CA Technologies is one of those IT companies that makes important but under-the-covers-type software that people often take for granted. For example, when you swipe your credit card at a payment location, you’re most likely hitting a mainframe somewhere in the world with CA’s software that connects the dots for that transaction. The user sees Wells Fargo and Visa, for example, but certainly doesn’t see CA, which is providing the handshake and perhaps the security authorization for the purchase.
CA also makes development and testing tools so that banking software works correctly every time you want to use a credit card. It develops high-end security authentication middleware and has an agile DevOps platform for new-gen software development. It has a highly successful API (application programming interface) products and services division. It has provided mainframe software for IBM z Systems and others for decades. All of these are important but not easily understood, thus they’re often overlooked.
Our interviewee, Ayman Sayed, is Chief Product Officer at CA Technologies. He’s a man who’s seen a complete evolution in the IT business over a period of decades, and as the CPO, he’s responsible for making sure that CA applications and platforms get to market on time and work as they’re supposed to work. He described the role CA plays in the world of IT here in this interview, conducted at the company’s Built for Change Summit on June 5, 2018.
At the event in Santa Clara, Calif., CA Technologies released to general availability its CA Brightside toolkit, a new-gen suite of development tools that enables clients to control, script and develop on the mainframe using similar tools and processes as they would use in any other cloud platform.
CA Brightside works with best-in-breed developer tools, including Visual Studio, to integrate the mainframe into a company’s enterprise DevOps initiatives. The company said that this will become available first to clients using the IBM Cloud.
CA and IBM said they will continue to partner on operational capabilities to imrpove zCloud efficiencies. These initiatives include streamlining client onboarding, automating operations and speeding the provisioning process for new environments.
Using this relationship, the companies are architecting new ways to enable clients to develop, run and manage mainframe applications in the cloud. User can access development, testing, application management and regulatory compliance services to deliver operational efficiencies and workforce agility, CA said.
The software and services are available today to all IBM Cloud Managed Services on z Systems client environments in North America and will be rolled out globally throughout the rest of 2018, the companies said.
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