DATA SHEET CA Business Service Insight With CA Business Service Insight, you can know what services are being used within your business, improve service performance while helping to reduce operating costs, and be better able to choose the most appropriate internal and external services for your business.. Overview CA Business Service Insight 8.0 is an innovative software solution for managing IT service performance. The solution helps empower companies to better articulate the value of IT in business terms including understanding service performance from the top down, integrating service and service level performance management and leveraging service ratings and comparisons. CA Business Service Insight enables companies to determine what services are being utilized and how they re performing against service level agreements (SLAs), and compare them with both internal and external alternatives. Benefits CA Business Service Insight may help your company reduce the risks associated with unknown and undefined services, help improve performance of services and service level agreements, and help identify the service options that will further help advance your business.
Managing performance in a cloud-connected world Historically when we looked at how companies provide IT enabled services to the rest of the organization, there was a unique relationship wherein the IT department was the sole provider of these services; however, the advent and adoption of cloud computing has vastly increased the number of options that are available for the IT Consumer. As companies adopt or even expand usage of cloud-based services, they need to consider whether they are ready to incorporate this shift in thinking into the service delivery infrastructure. The issue is particularly relevant because, organizationally, companies typically have not progressed very far in terms of their ability to manage these services. There are many projects that touch on the management of these services, but none that fully understand the service and the tradeoffs between internal and external options. For example, service catalog projects may, in part, have been designed to help address the issue of what services are used by internal and external customers but focus primarily on requests and fulfillment. Service costing might be undertaken but may not understand the tradeoffs between as a service options and internal ones. Service level management might have been adopted but without the understanding of service performance (focusing solely on obligations). In addition, outsourcing strategies may have been put in place but focusing only on traditional outsourcers and ignoring newer cloud-based options. In other words, the strategies do not holistically understand the services that are provisioned internally today; moreover, as many services may have been acquired directly from SaaS, IaaS and PaaS vendors without IT involvement or knowledge, there is a possibility that unknown services are leveraged throughout the company. This, of course, opens up the company to business and security risks associated with the performance of these unknown services. For instance, even though you might outsource your email to Google, an outage in that service might very well affect your company s ability to say close a contract. Finally, with the ever increasing number of options, it is difficult to make apples to apples comparisons between services. Knowing whether the most appropriate option is cloud-based, or traditionally focused, internal or external, requires that you fully comprehend the tradeoffs between these options. 2
Addressing these challenges But what if you could know what services are being used, easily improve the performance of both services and SLAs while reducing their costs, and evaluate the tradeoffs of internal and external service options? With CA Business Service Insight, this is precisely what you can do. The solution helps enable the company to manage both traditional and cloud-based services by first understanding which services are currently running in your environment, understanding how they are performing against operational and contractual SLAs, and connecting with Cloud Commons to empower your company to compare performance with benchmark partners and explore alternatives for delivering this service. Unlike large infrastructure providers which are limited to operational monitoring tools for measuring individual infrastructure elements and service desk solutions for managing service incidents, CA Business Service Insight allows your company to determine what services are in use, how these services perform and how the SLAs that leverage them perform. You will also gain the ability to compare services performance with other internal and external alternatives. 3
This means that, CA Business Service Insight can help your company to: Reduce business and security risks associated with rogue services Improve the performance of your operations Optimize the capabilities of your IT services by right-sourcing to the most effective alternative Service at the center To accomplish this, CA Business Service Insight puts the service at the center of the offering and helps to enable the company to determine what services are currently in use, leverage these services within contractual SLAs, measure the performance of the services themselves, compare service performance with that of benchmark partners, and research different options to optimize performance over time. Product Function Benefits CA Business Service Insight A comprehensive service design and discovery Service Performance Service Comparison Sourcing Studies Contractual Service Level Reduces performance and security risks from not knowing what is running where Understand the performance of our service operations Benchmark performance against similar organizations Research alternatives to current service offerings Improve performance against services levels, increase customer satisfaction and reduce operating costs Leveraging cloud commons To support service comparisons, CA Business Service Insight leverages the Service Measurement Index (SMI). SMI functionality lets your organization compare your services against each other across standardized metrics. Additionally, the global SMI database, hosted on cloudcommons. com, can be leveraged to compare your services against a large list of market alternatives. SMI was developed by the Cloud Service Measurement Initiative Consortium led by Carnegie Mellon with CA Technologies as a founding member. SMI employs six top-level metrics to compare IT business services (quality, agility, risk, capability, cost and security) with more granular measurements within each. With SMI, you can evaluate your current performance against internal and external service options. In addition, by customizing the weightings of the metrics according to your specific concerns, a company is able to identify the most appropriate service alternatives and help improve your IT business performance. 4
The CA Technologies advantage With CA Business Service Insight, your company will: Know what services are being used, Optimize service performance while helping to reduce operating costs, Use the most appropriate internal and external services for your business. This will, in turn, help enable your company to manage the performance execution of internal operations, of your external outsourcers and cloud vendors and understand the performance tradeoffs between these environments. Next steps To learn more about CA Business Service Insight and how you can benefit from the complete solution and rapid time-to-value, please contact your Sales Representative or visit us at ca.com/businessserviceinsight for more information. To learn more and see how CA Technologies software solutions enable organizations to manage and secure IT environments and deliver business agility, please visit ca.com/customers. Connect with CA Technologies at ca.com Agility Made Possible: The CA Technologies Advantage CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) provides IT management solutions that help customers manage and secure complex IT environments to support agile business services. Organizations leverage CA Technologies software and SaaS solutions to accelerate innovation, transform infrastructure and secure data and identities, from the data center to the cloud. CA Technologies is committed to ensuring our customers achieve their desired outcomes and expected business value through the use of our technology. To learn more about our customer success programs, visit ca.com/customer-success. For more information about CA Technologies go to ca.com. Copyright 2011 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. This document is for your informational purposes only. CA assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the information. To the extent permitted by applicable law, CA provides this document as is without warranty of any kind, including, without limitation, any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or noninfringement. In no event will CA be liable for any loss or damage, direct or indirect, from the use of this document, including, without limitation, lost profits, business interruption, goodwill, or lost data, even if CA is expressly advised in advance of the possibility of such damages. acs1382_0611