A little help from their friends - Computer Associates International' third-party agreements - Company Business and Marketing

Third-party vendor alliances are key to Computer Associates' bid to make Unicenter the be-all platform in distributed systems management

Computer Associates International Inc., Islandia, N.Y., is nothing if not enthusiastic about the future of its CA-Unicenter product. The software giant has been working aggressively since 1992 to offer a systems management framework that can compete successfully with such system management players as Hewlett-Packard, IBM/Tivoli and Platinum Technology. A strong part of that push has been CA's joint development agreements with third-party tool vendors, which have done as much to stir up the playing field in the past year or two as the development of its Unicenter/TNG second-generation platform software.

Does the choice of systems management framework really matter? From the point of view of third-party vendors, the framework has a great deal of significance. Standalone tools must have hooks into the bigger platforms; these hooks reassure customers that they won't end up isolated and unable to use other software products. However, interfacing with frameworks from multiple vendors such as CA, HP, Tivoli, Platinum and Groupe Bull can require a significant amount of effort by the third-party vendor.

"A point product is an island and, to succeed, it has to have bridges to the mainland," says Sue Aldrich, senior consultant at The Patricia Seybold Group Inc., Boston. "Providing links to other platforms means that the vendor has to do something special for each platform and, often, for each product executing within that platform. This can become a very large task, as well as one that demands a continuing commitment."

Smaller point-product vendors frequently opt to develop for just one platform. "Most of them choose HP OpenView because it has the largest market share among system management platform providers [in the Unix environment]," Aldrich says. For its part, CA is hoping to overtake HP's leadership position with its growing network of third-party alliances.

To customers, frameworks -- in and of themselves -- really don't matter. "No customer I've ever talked to has bought an architecture," Aldrich says. "Customers buy products that fill needs." Bob Beauchamp, vice president of strategic marketing and corporate development at Houston-based BMC Software Inc., agrees. "Our customers don't want to pay for concept," he says. "They want to solve real-world problems."

BMC, a CA partner, offers the Patrol suite of data and applications software management tools, which runs on a variety of client/server platforms and supports multiple relational databases, including Informix, Oracle, Sybase, Rdb and CA-Ingres. According to Beauchamp, BMC achieves this degree of interoperability through PatrolView, a knowledge module that contains a set of modifiable policies, rules and thresholds pertinent to a specific operating system, application, middleware or database. A Patrol agent can obtain information and pass the data to the system manager, where it can be viewed from a single console, he explains. If a threshold has been exceeded, the agent relays this information to CA-Unicenter.

Beauchamp admits that interfacing with multiple frameworks is not easy. Nonetheless, many enterprises run numerous frameworks and require products that execute in all of them. "Although it is not optimal for an enterprise to be running multiple frameworks, many customers find themselves in that situation," he says. "Reasons for this vary from company to company. In some enterprises, separate business units may have built up different frameworks from the early days of the business; in other companies, multiple frameworks may be the result of acquisitions. In any case, because most companies find it too strenuous to convert to a single environment, multiple frameworks are often a fact of life." Therefore, vendors seeking to expand their market are forced to provide links to several frameworks.

Conversely, a framework is only as good as its links. Interfaces to functionally rich business solutions from third-party vendors drive more sales than the structural elegance of the framework.

For its part, CA made Unicenter's expanding circle of partnerships the center of attention at its user group conference held this past August in New Orleans. There, CA announced alliances with a number of companies, with the intended goal of joint product development and cross-platform system management support. Firms such as Novadigm Inc., Mahwah, N.J., Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash., and Tandem Computers Inc., Cupertino, Calif., were added to CA's earlier list of partners, which included BMC, Sun Microsystems Inc., Mountain View, Calif., Hewlett-Packard Co., Cupertino, Calif., Landmark Systems Corp., Vienna, Va., Candle Corp., Santa Monica, Calif., and Cheyenne Software Inc., Roslyn Heights, N.Y.

Some industry observers question whether these alliances represent anything more than marketing hype. Not surprisingly, Andrew "Flip" Filipowski, the outspoken chairman, CEO and president of CA competitor Platinum Technology Inc., Oakbrook Terrace, Ill., takes issue with CA's claims about Unicenter's comprehensiveness, calling Unicenter "more a promotion than a framework with substantive applications." In an industry plagued with overstatement, such charges are not uncommon, especially when the stakes are so high: Winners of the system management wars stand to earn a lot of money. "System management is in its early days, so we are anticipating big growth in this arena," says Yogesh Gupta, senior vice president, product strategy at Computer Associates. "CA-Unicenter has already shown $650 million in revenues in [fiscal year] 1995."

Two of CA's most important strategic partnerships are with Tandem and Micro-soft. Says Bill Heil, Tandem's senior vice president and general manager for the ServerWare business unit, "Manageability of distributed systems has always been a big issue for Tandem. We were looking for possible partners among the framework providers. Unicenter was attractive because it was already close to delivering a system management capability for our clustered Himalaya platform." The two firms will incorporate Tandem's database management technology -- part of its line of ServerWare middleware -- into CA-Ingres for clustered environments. The two will also develop high-performance ServerNet cluster interconnect technology for CA-Unicenter, and integrate Tandem's fault-tolerant system management functionality into the framework.

Rather than spend precious resources on building its own system management tools, Tandem wanted a partner that could support its clustering and database products. "Tandem doesn't want to invest in management tools," says Heil. "However, we know that such tools are integral to the success of our customers. CA offers these tools, while Tandem brings its clustered processing technology to the partnership. CA and Tandem have great incentive to accomplish these goals." The reason: Both are battling for mindshare in the Global 2000 accounts that buy the bulk of such products.

The CA/Tandem partnership has proven beneficial for CoreStates Financial Corp., a commercial bank in Philadelphia running IBM mainframe and Tandem Himalaya environments. "We have been using tools from Computer Associates' CA90 product line on our mainframe side for a long time," says George Fiedorowicz, assistant vice president and manager of midrange technical services. "We have also used proprietary tools from Tandem, such as its NetBatch scheduler and NetMaster, to help manage our Himalaya environment."

Last April, he says, the bank decided to buy Unicenter to bring CA's mainframe strengths to the Tandem platform. "We wanted to standardize on a single management platform," Fiedorowicz says. CoreStates is currently using Unicenter's event manager, file manager and job scheduler.

"When Unicenter's security product is available, we will probably install it, phasing out Tandem's Safeguard software, which we currently use," he adds. CoreStates also uses Prognosis, a third-party tool from Integrated Research, for monitoring disk performance on the Tandem system. "When a threshold is exceeded, an alert is passed on to Unicenter where the event is reported on a single console. Using Prognosis and Unicenter together helps the operators be more proactive in managing the system," says Fiedorowicz.

For its part, Microsoft's relationship with CA focuses on Unicenter/TNG and the Web-based Enterprise Management (WBEM) initiative launched by Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Intel Corp. According to Michael Emanuel, Microsoft's product manager for systems management, "Microsoft provides the underlying components that make Windows NT-based TNG viable, while CA builds a management platform on top of it."

Regarding the WBEM initiative, Emanuel notes that CA and Microsoft were among a group of vendors that agreed to find a non-proprietary, platform-independent mechanism for sharing management information. Together these companies defined a common data schema, designed to describe any type of system management information.

To date, the initiative has borne fruit in the form of the HyperMedia Management Schema (HMMS), an object data model that defines the hardware and software elements in a network; and the HyperMedia Management Protocol (HMMP), a communications protocol that facilitates communication between systems management products. While WBEM has gained the backing of hardware and software vendors, HMMS and HMMP have yet to be refined by standards committees.

At CA-World, Computer Associates announced that it would use the HyperMedia Management Schema in TNG. At the same time, Microsoft previewed a prototype of how that schema would operate inside NT. "Today, there's a Unicenter product for Windows NT that links Unicenter to an SMS server," Emanuel says. "It is a unique gateway. Using HMMS and HMMP, TNG and NT were able to share management information. In the future, we will be able to eliminate the need for a specific gateway."

Going forward, the company plans to strengthen its alliances, says Gupta. In October, CA announced its intention to acquire Cheyenne Software, a provider of storage management software for Microsoft's Windows NT and Novell's NetWare platforms. The firm also acquired Digital's AssetWorks technology, which beefs up Unicenter with asset and desktop management functionality for LAN, Unix and OpenVMS platforms.

What such acquisitions and alliances will produce in the near future is still unclear. The newly merged, or newly acquired, products and technologies announced at CA-World have not yet had time to hit real-world customer environments. The only sure thing is that, for now, the strengths of Computer Associates and its competitors preclude any declaration of victory in the system management wars.

Mary Hanna is a freelance writer based in Cary, N.C.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Wiesner Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group