Server Den: CA Seeks IT Automation Sweet Spot

InformationWeek: You've talked about reducing complexity and informed optimization. Is there anything else?

Ferguson: The third element is aligning IT management with the larger systems applications in a business environment. This means aligning IT decisions, aligning IT monitoring with the larger business-activity monitoring environment. It's also reporting on the financial impact of service-level management. We're trying to move beyond doing things like talking about response time and input and paging rates, and start talking about surfacing IT in terms of business understanding.

InformationWeek: Many of networking people I've talked with say that the complexity is being pushed out to the edge of the network, and managing across domains is going to be difficult.

Ferguson: That's certainly true. Whenever there's a touch point in a handoff there will be complexity. The first source of complexity is going to be the number of instances. Virtualization can reduce complexity because you have a smaller number of similar virtual images, but you have a lot more virtual images than you have physical images. So complexity comes from scale.

Complexity will also come from the demands of economy. Cloud solutions, cloud composite applications are going to span multiple domains of control. We've been experimenting with some of this to see how our software would work in this cloud world. We have an ongoing proof of concept to deploy and manage an application that spans Microsoft Azure, Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Salesforce.com, and a couple of other services.

Another source of complexity is dynamicism, which is the fact that we're making the world a lot more dynamic. We're building software where right now the virtual machine could be on my internal cluster, but in an hour it could be out on Amazon EC2. We're building systems to manage this.

InformationWeek: Tell me more about that.

Ferguson: We have a major focus on a concept called Insight. We will look at your environment in all of its complexity and we will surface it to you in an intuitive model. So, for example, if you've got a very complex, interconnected environment, we will enable you to see how transactions flow through them. InformationWeek: As we wrap up, do you have any other observations?

Ferguson: I suspect that what happens over time is that even companies which start up with a purely cloud environment begin to get some stuff on premise. The net of this is that every API is going to be out there on the Web somewhere. You're going to be stitching those things together. The portfolio of callable APIs is the Internet.

InformationWeek: Yet cloud security remains a prime concern.

Ferguson: The fundamental basis of any security environment is trust. As soon as trust begins to emerge, people will start to progressively exploit the cloud more. There are certain things that companies like CA Technologies can do to help. We can federate identity cross various environments. We can put in data-link protection products at those boundaries to make sure sensitive information is not going to get out. The trust mechanism for the cloud will emerge.

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Alex Wolfe is editor-in-chief of InformationWeek.com.