Leveraging CA IDMS Business Value for Innovation

Ptak, Noel & Associates LLC White Paper
Leveraging CA IDMST Business Value for Innovation Business and IT executives should not have to choose between their desire to innovate for future growth and the desire to avoid disrupting current operations. Enterprise innovation that embraces and extends existing infrastructure and applications is possible through modern software architectures such as web services and SOA - as long as those investments perform competitively when measured against alternative platforms and they are able to be modernized to participate in these architectures. CA has a strong history of both honing CA IDMS? competitive performance and availability advantages and modernizing CA IDMS to keep current with advances in software architectures and development practices. This paper discusses how CA?s continuous investments have enhanced and modernized CA IDMS; how enterprises can leverage CA IDMS? performance and availability advantages in innovative software projects; and the benefits of innovative reuse of existing CA IDMS environments.
----------- © 2008 Ptak, Noel & Associates LLC ----------- Leveraging CA IDMS' Business Value for Innovation Page 1
Enterprise Innovation Can Embrace Existing Infrastructure The application of technology to achieve business goals has long been at the center of increasing competitiveness and improving business operations. Recent advances in software architectures, rapid development techniques, and hardware infrastructure provide enormous opportunities for future business innovation, even as enterprises depend on their proven technological investments, such as CA IDMS to automate core business functions that deliver today?s revenue streams. This dichotomy often creates tension between innovating for future growth and sustaining current operations. On the one hand, there is the desire to enter new markets or change the competitive landscape with new services. Business intelligence analysis and reporting, providing back-office support for new online services, automating business to business transactions, and eliminating information gaps between government agencies are just a few opportunities for business innovation to stimulate future revenue. On the other hand, the operational value of the CA IDMS environment is clear (for example, financial and manufacturing enterprises typically process billions of dollars worth of transactions through CA IDMS), whereas the costs and risks of platform migration can be astronomically high. This is particularly true as the size and complexity of the database and application environment increases. Proposals of three million dollars to convert a single CA IDMS application and estimates of twenty to fifty million dollars and higher to convert a portfolio of CA IDMS applications are not unusual. Additionally, even the most thorough cost analyses have difficultly estimating the risks associated with application functionality that cannot be accurately duplicated or underperformance of the new database structure. These risks and costs increase the imperative to maintain and extend the current operating infrastructure. Rather than allowing this tension to create untenable choices for business and IT executives, Ptak, Noel & Associates (PNA) advocates enterprise innovation that embraces and extends existing infrastructure and application assets. When enterprise innovation is done in a vacuum, the near-term results are usually not as effective as applying a combination of new technology and existing infrastructure. Consider Apple?s iPhone that delivers slick new capabilities in a new form factor, but has achieved rapid adoption because it also leverages familiar applications and runs over an existing network. In the case of CA IDMS, corporate data and applications are key assets that can be combined with new technologies and business models to deliver competitive advantage. When innovation is combined with existing infrastructure, business and IT, executives no longer are forced to choose between developing new opportunities and disrupting business operations. In the case of CA IDMS, there are three factors that make this combination possible. First, modern application arch... [download for more]