|
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 architectures (such as J2EE, .Net, SOA, and Web Services) enable “legacy systems” to be “reusable assets.” While much of the current excitement about these architectures revolves around creating new applications, it is important to remember that these architectures also dramatically simplify creative reuse of existing technology. These architectures provide a cleaner separation of software component implementation, workflow connecting the components, and middleware providing the physical integration than in many older architectures or “marketectures.” This separation dramatically simplifies innovation because code conversions, data migrations, and technology replacements are not required to combine existing data and applications with new business applications and processes. In other words, innovation is no longer at odds with maintaining existing technology investments, as long as those investments perform competitively against alternative platforms and they are modernized to participate in these architectures. The onus is on the technology supplier, in this case CA, to deliver superior database responsiveness to new workloads generated by the new projects and to simplify database access so that from an application development standpoint, there is no distinction between relational and non-relational databases. The other factors that allow enterprises to innovate while embracing and extending their CA IDMS environments are CA's continued investment in maintaining CA IDMS' competitive advantages and CA's continuous modernization strategy for CA IDMS.
The majority of CA's research and development investment in CA IDMS over the last 20 years has been directed at these issues. CA customers have been reaping the benefits. “We have one system with 400 million records,” said Bruce Hillyer, manager of database administration for the United States Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “No [new] relational database can handle the volume or the search capabilities required” to manage such a large number of records.
Spencer Briggs, Director of Justice Technology Services for South Australia's State Justice System, notes, “Another major strength of the solution is its ability to allow growth and flexibility in the development of the Justice Information System. CA IDMS lets us incorporate additional data with minimal impact on existing applications, which makes it an evolutionary system. It can flex, shift, and expand, so that while organizational structures come and go, our criminal justice system continues on. As we progressively adopt Web Services, CA IDMS will remain a key data repository.” Let us examine CA's investment in CA IDMS more closely.
|
