Network Change and Configuration Management: Optimize

Network Change and Configuration Management: Optimize Reliability, Minimize Risk and Reduce CostsAn ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) White Paper Prepared for CA March 2008

Table of Contents

Executive Introduction.......................................................................................................................................................................1

Market Requirements are Taking IT Management to a Tipping Point .....................................................................................1

Governance, Management and Security ....................................................................................................................................3

Financial Accountability ...............................................................................................................................................................3

The Rise of Network Change and Configuration Management ..............................................................................................3

The Importance of Managing Change ......................................................................................................................................4

NCCM Key Requirements ...........................................................................................................................................................5

Understanding Marketplace Priorities ......................................................................................................................................6

OpEx and CapEx Benefits from NCCM Investments .....................................................................................................7

Technical Benefits from NCCM Solutions: What You Should Look For.....................................................................8

NCCM Marketplace Issues ................................................................................................................................................................9

The CA SPECTRUM Network Configuration Manager (NCM) ............................................................................................9

CA SPECTRUM NCM: Overall Positioning ...........................................................................................................................9

A Product in Evolution .........................................................................................................................................................10

CA SPECTRUM NCM’s Architecture ....................................................................................................................................11

EMA’s Perspective .............................................................................................................................................................................11

About CA ............................................................................................................................................................................................12

Network Change and Configuration Management: Optimize Reliability, Minimize Risk and Reduce Costs

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©2008 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Executive IntroductionOne of the most dramatic innovations in the infrastruc-ture management marketplace in the last five years is the rise of Network Change and Configuration Management (NCCM) as a strategic requirement. In the past, network configuration management had been relegated to a pure-play element management approach associated with the “care and feeding” of new network device assets.

However, NCCM in 2008 is helping to reshape infra-structure management toward a more strategic, pro-cess-aligned discipline with a wide range of benefits. These include supporting service integrity and service performance, minimizing risk, optimizing security and compliance, managing network assets more holistically, and achieving what in the past were undreamed of new levels of operational efficiency.

Moreover, recent EMA research and consulting dialog consistently reinforces the fact that NCCM solutions provide significant savings in capital expenditures (CapEx) and operating expenditures (OpEx), reduce total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) due to operational gains in managing network assets, and lead to a more cohe-sive approach to lifecycle asset management.

This white paper will focus on the strong values that NCCM can bring to reliability, risk and cost manage-ment, as well as some of its powerful operational and lifecycle asset values. In doing so, this report will draw strongly from EMA research conducted in 2007 on real world requirements and adoption patterns, as well as EMA’s ongoing research into available technologies and products in the NCCM marketplace.

This report will also introduce the CA SPECTRUM Network Configuration Manager (NCM) as a dis-tinctive leadership offering in the NCCM arena. CA SPECTRUM NCM offers cohesive functionality for integrated service, fault and configuration management. EMA will examine the implications and benefits of such an integrated solution, while looking at some of its broader advantages in the areas of risk management, operational automation and asset management. Finally, this assessment will place CA SPECTRUM NCM in in-dustry context – as an innovator with unique values for network operations and IT as a whole.

Market Requirements are Taking IT Management to a Tipping PointIT organizations that run as standalone overhead without clear business accountability are becoming a thing of the past. This is true across all markets – SMB through enterprise, public sector, and service provider. The reasons for this have a great deal to do with mac-roeconomic trends and business competitiveness. IT services can now contribute to business and operational efficiency and help businesses reach new markets, buy-ers and partners. They can directly generate revenue and so become a business service in and of themselves – and this accelerating trend goes far beyond Internet-centric businesses. IT services can even help to create new busi-ness models and new ways of doing business.

A look at macroeconomic and competitive pressures across each sector is worth mentioning:

Enterprises can enhance productivity, achieve new revenue targets, reach new buyers and partners, and even create new business models by leveraging their IT infrastructure and its services. In parallel, many enterprise business environments are becoming more service provider-like themselves – especially within industries such as healthcare and financial services, which increasingly depend on centralized IT expertise to support new modes of business operations.

Governmental IT services are changing the face of how and where state agencies work interactively with each other, how they interact with federal agencies, and how and where the state reaches out to new constituencies.

Service providers are facing increasingly steeper competition for customer loyalty, and hence to demonstrate QoE (Quality of Experience) as it is becoming increasingly easy to switch providers. Moreover, service providers are also facing new types of competition, such as from cable companies and even Internet companies like Google and Yahoo. And finally, if they don’t want to be just one more component in someone else’s solutions, service providers have to become more varied and application centric in their service offerings, which in turn places extreme pressure

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on them to manage their networks cohesively in support of the delivery of application and other business services.

One factor behind this trend is the sheer growth in quantity and type of new IT services, such as Web Services, Web 2.0, VoIP and wireless. The volume and heterogeneity of new services that depend increasingly on network transport is enough to put network manag-ers in all sectors in a state of alert. EMA research (Figure 1) shows that most enterprise, public sector and service provider environments expect to provide a wide range of application services for their constituencies.

A second factor underneath this involves new trends in application technology, in particular, Web-based applica-tions, Web 2.0 and Web Services-based Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), that allow for business models and application design to be more and more tightly interwo-ven. In recent EMA research, 40% of network planners expect the move to SOA-based Web Services to impact their performance requirements significantly in the near term (within one year). As these application architectures become more geographically dispersed, the pressures on network reliability and network-aware application capa-bilities will force aggressive changes in how networks and applications are managed across the industry.

Figure 1: Most IT environments enjoy and expect a wide range of application types (“Managing Application Performance Over the Network,” EMA, Q4 2006)

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A third and actually related factor is geographic sprawl. Enterprise, public sector, and service provider orga-nizations depend more and more on geographically distributed and sometimes even global presence. This geographical dispersion has also been accelerated by business partnerships and supply-chain dynamics, which are increasingly geographically diverse. Such growth in geographic sprawl is of course placing added stress upon the network, and adding to the size and complexity of most networks. The range of branch office requirements can be seen in Figure 2 in a balanced sample of respon-dents that spans small and large businesses, public sector service providers and organizations.

Governance, Management and SecurityPressures for compliance, accountability and security are also impacting the way that enterprise IT, government IT and service provider OSS/BSS must work. There is probably little in high technology more obvious than the fact that issues of corporate governance, manage-ment and security have become strategic IT initiatives. As more and more business is done online, more atten-tion is paid to every transaction that touches “tangible assets” of financial or competitive value and those that directly impact the well being of individuals, businesses and even nation states. The increasing exploitation of personal information is too common today. Now, the network is a critical “door” to protect from ungoverned access to information.

The regulatory and compliance landscape provides an equal challenge. There are corporate compliance re-quirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley for corporate gover-nance, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) for patient privacy, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) for financial reporting, and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) for account data security. There is also legislation that’s driven by national security, such as the Patriot Act.

The challenge for IT is in managing appropriate access to information for businesses to compete effectively, while at the same time protecting the privacy of individuals, the security of company assets, and the audit trail that supports regulatory requirements. But IT must address these challenges in the face of larger, more complex, more frequently changed networks. It’s something of a double whammy.

Financial AccountabilityFinally, IT is at a tipping point because as an integral part of the business, increasingly prone to stringent business metrics, it must demonstrate its contributions in dollars-and-cents more than ever. While this may not be new for service providers, it has become a slow burning revolu-tion for enterprises and public sector organizations that are now required to measure themselves against mission objectives. The notion that IT is providing a “service” as its virtual “product,” and that all costs need to be measured against this concept, and “service” needs to be measured in terms of business relevance and revenue impact – is just taking hold among IT shops. Such a next-generation model for IT financial accountability is supported by new trends in best practices, such as in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3’s definition of “Service Lifecycle Management,” but it is still in its in-fancy within many IT organizations. Nonetheless, step-ping up to this model is inevitable, and it will require new levels of discipline and efficiency in how IT man-ages and plans for change.

The Rise of Network Change and Configuration Management Spurred by the network build-out in the 1990s and a sig-nificant dependence on networks, NCCM has become essential for IT organizations in enterprise, government and service provider environments. Element-specific, uni-brand solutions for existing configuration manage-ment have been unable to keep pace with the need for scalability, operational efficiency and functionality that characterize the current high requirements to support geographically dispersed environments.

In general, element vendor solutions have been propri-etary command line interface (CLI) in design and re-quire a high level of device-specific expertise. In some instances the knowledge required to effectively leverage element vendor solutions for configuration has been so high as to render the software all but unusable. And while it’s true that EMA has worked with some network administrators who prefer a CLI due to habit, in the end more facile and “sharable” technologies must win out over more individualized and technically complex ap-proaches for reasons of scalability and cost efficiency.


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The requirements for NCCM solutions have emerged over the last seven years with solutions that are typically demonstrating value in environments with 50 or more network devices.

The primary drivers for this are:

The IT infrastructure is becoming more complex and heterogeneous. Research ranging from late-2006 and throughout 2007 (Figure 3) has substantiated that network complexity is growing in parallel with application complexity as a huge number of transport technologies are often in play across a single organization led by IP and Ethernet, not surprisingly, and followed by VPN and wireless.

This growth in types of services is creating a greater density of volume running over the network, coupled with denser devices to support these services. Added device density alone – which in many cases is orders of magnitude what it was just five or ten years ago – means greater challenges for configuration management.

Greater frequencies of change to network device configuration, including the growing pervasiveness of patch updates, is an order-of-magnitude shift from ten years ago and a potentially disruptive factor in an already complex and challenging networked universe.

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Cascading failures resulting from incorrect changes to device configurations is something that can keep any network manager awake at night. A senior NOC director for a large enterprise confessed that 80% of the times he made a change to the network, he had to make additional changes to achieve a stable state of network performance, and that in 10% of those cases, he suffered what he termed “catastrophic failures.”

Security threats that are “allowed in” through faulty or non-compliant configurations are a growing challenge. NCCM solutions can also govern, control and limit those who have access to change network devices, and document how, where and when changes were made.

Compliance initiatives, whether government or industry directed, depend on effective change and configuration management. In some cases, NCCM solutions offer templates to support audits required for Sarbanes-Oxley, GLBA, HIPAA or PCI DSS.

The Importance of Managing ChangeAnother driver for the increase in NCCM adoptions is the rising awareness and interest in managing change across the infrastructure. This interest has stimulated a growing commitment to follow best practices, and espe-cially in ITIL.

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Figure 3: Network transport technologies tend to aggregate as new capabilities surface and older transport capabilities linger on – adding to network complexity (“Network Change and Configuration Management Adoption,” August, 2007)


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EMA has tracked the rising interest in ITIL over the last several years (Figure 4). ITIL has rightfully educated IT that managing change effectively is at the very core of running an efficient service-oriented IT organiza-tion. ITIL v3’s focus on Service Lifecycle Management further reinforces the importance of managing change. The need to adopt a system that can technically support a more consistent and collaborative process of work-ing is then paramount. NCCM solutions have profited greatly from this interest.

Not surprisingly, EMA has seen dramatic improve-ments once NCCM solutions are coupled with ITIL process initiatives, in one case bringing 400% return on investment (ROI) from the cost of the software in terms of reduced downtime (mean time between failures, or MTBF) and mean time to repair (MTTR).

It should be stressed that technology and process improvements can unite to literally transform some IT organizations. Effective technology can support a more consistent approach to change management, which naturally combines with and helps to enable a clear commitment to process improvement in managing and monitoring the impacts of change.

NCCM Key RequirementsIn understanding the rise of NCCM, it’s useful to sum-marize key requirements that most NCCM solutions face:

Accelerating operational requirements for frequent device configuration changes, directly impacting

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operational efficiency, compliance and other infrastructure management tasks.

Providing a multi-vendor solution and broad intra-vendor support. In interview after interview, IT managers shied away from brand lock-in by hardware choice when it came to network configuration management.

Easing deployment, use and maintenance – including easy-to-use interfaces and extensibility to new or different vendor devices. This is a growing requirement, one with significant differences across brands, that impacts both time to value and the scalability of the solution.

Scaling to support hundreds of thousands of networking devices from multiple providers, especially for large service provider environments.

Documenting configuration changes, including what the changes were, who made them, and when. This is imperative from a security and compliance perspective, as well as essential in the support of problem and incident management.

Providing not only monitoring and documentation, but actual policy enforcement for authorized access controls, which is critical to both compliance and security.

Recovering from configuration change errors with more automated tools to improve operational efficiency and minimize service downtime.

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Figure 4: ITIL and “in-house” dominate best practice initiatives linked to NCCM deployments (“Network Change and Configuration Management Adoption,” EMA, August, 2007)


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Minimizing complexity by removing the need to use element management systems associated with multiple device types.

Understanding Marketplace Priorities In August of 2007, EMA completed extensive research addressing adoptions of NCCM solutions (Network Change and Configuration Management (NCCM) Adoption Report). Some of the highlights worth mentioning here, as they impact the growth and direction of the NCCM market, are as follows:

Most network configuration is done in house, rather than by service providers or outsourcers. According to EMA data, 64.5% of 121 respondents said they managed network configuration changes entirely in house. Another 21.1% outsourced about 25% of their NCCM requirements. Less than 15% said they outsourced 50% or more of their NCCM requirements. Of

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these, a minor 1.3% outsourced NCCM completely. This underscores the strategic nature of NCCM adoption.

Nonetheless, there remains a fairly high level of dissatisfaction with many NCCM investments. Of these 121 respondents, only 11.8% are very satisfied, 35.5% are somewhat satisfied and the rest are neutral (27.6%), somewhat dissatisfied (17.1%) or very dissatisfied (7.9%). EMA believes this is a testament to the relative newness of NCCM solutions. Complexity in deployments, the need to support integrations with a wide variety of other infrastructure management tools, and the fact that configuration management requires attention to process are likely to cause dissatisfaction among those adopters seeking to purchase a “quick fix.”

NCCM adopters stressed the importance of integration with other management systems. As can be seen in Figure 5, a striking total of nearly

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Figure 5: NCCM adopters stress integration with other management systems (“Network Change and Configuration Management Adoption,” EMA, August, 2007)

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Figure 6: Reducing trouble tickets is the dominant metric for measuring NCCM investments (Note: Many respondents don’t have defined metrics)

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80% thought integration with other management solutions was either very important or somewhat important.

And given the wide variety of benefits associated with NCCM deployments, it is interesting that a reduction in the number of trouble tickets was the number one metric associated with gauging NCCM success (Figure 6). This would indicate that while managing change is in itself critical, deployments that integrate tightly with event correlation, root-cause analysis and fault remediation tools will remain a dominant phase one priority for at least the near term.

In association with this, EMA gained some striking in-sights into the growing maturity of IT adopters in terms of diagnosing problems directly related to managing application performance over the network. In some

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groundbreaking research from Q4 of 2006, (“Managing Application Performance Over the Network”), EMA learned that the effective monitoring of configuration changes was the number one diagnostic associated with troubleshooting application performance issues across distributed infrastructures (Figure 7). With a respondent base that was about 60% from the NOC and 40% from the data center, network configuration changes came in as top priority, followed by system configuration and ap-plication configuration monitoring.

OpEx and CapEx Benefits from NCCM InvestmentsAlso taken from the August research was an examina-tion of benefits expected from network change and configuration capabilities (Figure 8). These tend to un-derscore some of the observations already stated about the importance of integration with other systems, and

Figure 7: Network Configuration Changes are the single most desired diagnostic for troubleshooting application performance issues over the network

Figure 8: Openness plus reduction plus resolving performance and downtime issues are paramount for NCCM adopters

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the importance of NCCM as part of an integrated pack-age with systems that can effectively manage the health and reliability of network services.

Interestingly enough, many of EMA’s interviews re-vealed that the perceived ROI for NCCM deployments can be dramatic. For instance, in a number of customer environments, uptime improved between 99.3% and 99.9%! More commonly, outages due to performance and security issues that resulted from misapplied con-figurations were reduced from 90% of the problems to a mere 10% of the problems. In some cases, with strong process initiatives, configuration errors dropped to nearly 0%.

Similarly, time to assess the inadvertent impact of change and fix it on the network could be reduced from multiple hours to less than five minutes. And operational advantages might enable updates, such as patches, to be performed with a dramatic rise in efficiency – from 20 an hour to up to 10,000 an hour.

These findings demonstrate that NCCM solutions can provide significant savings in capex and opex, reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) due to operational gains in managing network assets and lead to a more cohesive approach to lifecycle asset management.

More commonly, outages due to performance and security issues that resulted from

misapplied configurations were reduced from 90% of the problems to a mere

10% of the problems. In some cases, with strong process initiatives, configuration errors dropped to nearly 0%. Similarly, time to assess the inadvertent impact of change and fix it could be reduced from multiple hours to less than five minutes.

Nonetheless, complete and formalized ROI assess-ments remain problematic for NCCM given the many different kinds of benefits associated with NCCM deployments combined with the need for effective poli-

cies in managing change. Most of EMA respondents either weren’t sure (28.4%) or took a conservative set of expectations of one to two years (29.7%) in assess-ing full ROI. However, more than 20% were neverthe-less comfortable committing to demonstrable ROI within six months or less.

Technical Benefits from NCCM Solutions: What You Should Look ForThe following checklist is designed to help IT profes-sionals assess the technical attributes of NCCM solu-tions they may be evaluating. Most address a meaningful subset of the following:

Remove the need to know several command syntaxes

Reduce the high rate of human-introduced configuration errors

Provide operational efficiency through remote access to full infrastructure via a console or browser-enabled device

Enable mass multiple updates of device configurations

Support advanced root cause and event management by tracking network configurations across the full infrastructure

Support enhanced service management by reducing inadvertent degradations due to misconfigurations

Store device configuration changes histograms for failure analysis and disaster recovery

Alert on changes that are non-compliant with IT policy

Provide more consistent access control and audits that support both security and compliance initiatives

Increase control of configuration change process through multiple, role-based user access authorizations

Perform discovery and support inventory asset management through integrations with other data sources

Enable monitoring of the TCO for specific devices

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Provide better customer services through more efficient resource utilization

Support multiple roles in reporting – e.g., network admin, security, executive, etc.

Enable integrations with other infrastructure management solutions, such as Help Desk, Asset Management and Security

Support event and workflow integration to enable the integration of event correlation and root cause analysis through a dynamic awareness of network configuration changes

Support management across a heterogeneous network with features available to integrate data for unsupported devices

Support the never-ending tools consolidation initiatives that are typically present in a modern day organization

NCCM Marketplace IssuesThe above list represents a stunning testament to the potential value of NCCM solutions and the likelihood this market could be destined to take off like a rocket. The very recent (Q3/Q4 2007) spate of acquisitions of NCCM vendors would seem to support this idea. But most industry observers have been more perplexed by the relatively slow growth for such a new and suppos-edly dynamic market.

Probably the dominant reason for this is that NCCM is a strategic set of technologies that evolved largely out of small technical innovators. Three to five years ago, initial sales were often directed at tactical buyers focused on just one problem set out of the many problem sets that a robust NCCM solution can resolve. Moreover, most deployments were complex and challenging because they ultimately required some process expertise as well as significant integration efforts.

This market adoption picture was beginning to change even before the acquisition mania of late 2007. But EMA believes that NCCM will find its true footing as a strongly integrated set of capabilities with more plat-form-like capabilities. More complete offerings will ben-efit vendors capable of targeting more executive buyers who will place a high value on solutions that enhance

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service management efficiencies, help develop individ-ual professional skills, and enable broad organizational process improvements. For these more executive buy-ers, NCCM provides both a powerhouse for support-ing superior service management with implications far beyond the reliability of the network, while offering a catalyst for organizational transformation in support of more collaborative, more efficient and more account-able processes for managing change.

The CA SPECTRUM Network Configuration Manager (NCM) When CA acquired Concord Communications in June of 2005, it not only gained Concord eHealth Network Performance Manager but also SPECTRUM Network Fault Manager under development by Aprisma Management Technologies, which Concord had acquired earlier in 2005. With the acquisition of eHealth and SPECTRUM, CA made a bold step forward in becom-ing a leading network management provider, as well as a strong player in systems management, service desk, asset management and a number of related technologies in-cluding storage management and security. CA’s network management initiative had in fact been building over the five years before the Concord/Aprisma acquisition, partially based on partnerships with OPNET and Fluke Networks, but it was the Concord acquisition that fully enabled CA to become a formidable solution for man-aging both enterprise and service provider networks.

Within this portfolio of chiefly CA eHealth and CA SPECTRUM, SPECTRUM had already demonstrated unique advantages over much of its competition through the adaptive intelligence of its inference-based modeling and its robust capabilities for capturing complex device and network interdependencies. CA SPECTRUM’s modeling had also become a point of integration for a number of partners – including those in systems and application management – who understood the value of its intelligence in correlating beyond purely network problems to resolving reliability and availability issues across domains.

CA SPECTRUM NCM: Overall PositioningAll of this is important in understanding the role of the new CA SPECTRUM Network Configuration Manager (NCM) as an integrated function within SPECTRUM.


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Unlike virtually every other NCCM offering in the mar-ket, CA SPECTRUM NCM offers IT infrastructure managers seamless integration with a broader set of capabilities for service and fault management. As CA SPECTRUM’s object-based modeling and correlative intelligence already extends beyond purely network re-quirements to address critical IT services such as VoIP, multicast and MPLS technologies, CA SPECTRUM NCM can natively align with problem resolution across the full distributed network fabric.

This seamlessness in integration and common user interface has other advantages in terms of deploying NCCM. First, it’s easier to implement; CA estimates it can be less than one week for setup including most pol-icy definitions. Even more importantly, full integration means network and service management professionals at various levels can navigate and assess reports relating configuration change histories to service performance and service health. There are no ‘mushy” integrations between separate consoles, but a single set of integrated workflows, navigational choices and reports.

Some of the existing reports from CA SPECTRUM NCM target the following overall areas:

A history of compliant and non-policy compliant changes

Automated insights into “running” versus “startup” configurations

A report flagging all changes in configured devices and showing the delta between the new configuration and the prior configuration

On-demand (real-time) reports to examine configuration changes relevant to problem and incident management troubleshooting

CA SPECTRUM NCM leverages the OneClick admin-istrator interface (as can be seen in Figure 9) and vis-ibility access rights can be defined based on any number of logical roles.

A Product in EvolutionIt should be pointed out that earlier CA SPECTRUM functionality for NCCM, formerly known as CA SPECTRUM Configuration Manager (introduced in the mid 1990s), is itself the oldest, most mature entrant in the NCCM market. Its recent iteration as a full-fledged competitor across the NCCM space dates from CA

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Figure 9: Screenshot showing contextual role navigation for configuration changes across the network


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SPECTRUM 8.1, released in June of 2007. As such, it is very much a product in evolution – uniquely mature in its diagnostic strengths, but evolving in other areas such as operational automation and detailed compli-ance and security related reports. For instance, while CA SPECTRUM NCM can actively restore an altered con-figuration to a policy-compliant configuration state, its ability to support operational automation more broadly is still very much evolving. In its current state, it is op-timized to restore prior state configurations to resolve problems on a device by device basis but not directed at supporting pre-scheduled mass, multiple updates across the infrastructure. CA is aware of and forthcoming about this limitation and is introducing much improved operational automation over the course of 2008. EMA also expects other integrations across the CA portfo-lio (and possibly third-party platforms) to improve CA SPECTRUM NCM’s support for lifecycle asset manage-ment, capacity planning and service provisioning more broadly, as linkages between application interdependen-cies, on the one hand, and device asset information, on the other hand, become more explicit.

Another current limitation is the breadth of devices sup-ported by CA SPECTRUM NCM. As of January, 2008, these include Cisco, Juniper, Nortel, Enterasys, Foundry and Extreme. However this limitation should largely be addressed during the first half of 2008, with the CA SPECTRUM introduction of the CA SPECTRUM NCM Extension Utility, which is designed to extend support to unrepresented devices.

CA SPECTRUM NCM’s ArchitectureAs mentioned, CA SPECTRUM NCM has a long his-tory, but its newly enriched functionality with release 8.1 fully leverages CA SPECTRUM’s rich object-based modeling for capturing interdependencies, as well as years of evolution in support of Layers 2 and 3 network discovery. These linkages, including a common database for network service, fault and configuration manage-ment, position CA SPECTRUM NCM exceedingly well for higher levels of automated diagnostics.

Tight integration also positions CA SPECTRUM NCM well for more cohesive insights into network configura-tions as an extended part of the broader network to-pology in all of its contexts. Finally, such a strongly cohesive architecture up front should support CA

SPECTRUM NCM strongly as a future contributor to CA’s Configuration Management Database (CMDB). For example, the CA SPECTRUM Modeling Gateway delivers the ability to export CA SPECTRUM’s topol-ogy and connectivity information, as well as service definitions and service relationships for contribution to CMDBs; this gateway also provides the ability to import information from CMDBs or service provider OSS pro-visioning systems and databases.

It should be noted that CA SPECTRUM NCM discov-ery follows SPECTRUM’s overall autodiscovery capa-bilities. Data is stored in a knowledgebase and can be exported to XML or flat files; alternatively, the knowl-edgebase can be accessed using CA SPECTRUM’s CLI or programmatic APIs. CA SPECTRUM NCM uses what CA calls “Global Collections” to monitor con-figuration change. These “Global Collections” can be set up with dynamic search criteria in accordance with established policies.

EMA’s PerspectiveWhile many in the industry perceive CA SPECTRUM NCM as a new entrant, it is actually a mature and stable product with a long history. CA’s wisdom in reinvesting in network configuration management is already being borne out by customer eagerness and demand – some of which follows the “How do I get beyond CiscoWorks to a more strategic solution?” category. EMA expects to see many of CA’s competitors surprised at the rapid assimilation and evolution of CA SPECTRUM NCM to become a credible across-the-board NCCM contender.

EMA expects to see many of CA’s competitors surprised at the rapid assimilation and evolution of CA

SPECTRUM NCM to become a credible across-the-board NCCM contender.

This is especially true given the fact that CA SPECTRUM NCM already has a unique footprint and a natural starter market across its full CA SPECTRUM base. This link-age positions CA with clear advantages, but of course places a strong limitation on CA SPECTRUM NCM – it


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is not designed for integrations outside of those that CA SPECTRUM itself has with other solutions. It is, in effect, an extension of CA SPECTRUM, and so in this respect qualitatively different than virtually all of its other competitors.

But for CA SPECTRUM users and IT organizations looking to consolidate multiple infrastructure manage-ment tools, CA SPECTRUM NCM should quickly be-come a natural first choice. EMA expects CA to honor or even accelerate its promise to broaden NCM’s func-tionality aggressively in the areas of operational auto-mation and more extensive device support (through the NCM Extension Utility), and to continue to enhance the breadth of its reports with added templates to support compliance-related issues. Also, within the relatively near future, EMA expects to see CA deliver CA SPECTRUM NCM with its CMDB system, with support for critical areas such as application dependency mapping, lifecycle asset management across networks and systems, and in-tegrated process support for change management across the entire infrastructure.

As is often the case in the IT management industry, IT adopters face a choice between broad functional benefits on the one hand, and solutions that are easy to use and administer on the other hand. CA SPECTRUM NCM solution is an encouraging instance of a balanced initial footprint with a rich range of benefits combined with strong ease of use, deployment and administration. As CA builds from this initial footprint, EMA expects this laudable balance to continue.

About CACA, Inc. (NYSE:CA), positions itself as one of the world’s largest management software companies. It de-livers software and services across operations, security, storage, life cycle, and service management, to help or-ganizations optimize the performance, reliability, and ef-ficiency of their enterprise IT environments. Founded in 1976, CA is headquartered in Islandia, N.Y., has 14,500 employees, operates in more than 100 countries, and has achieved ISO 9001:2000 certification.

CA SPECTRUM is an important part of CA’s overall approach to transforming IT management. With its unique capabilities, CA can help IT organizations unify and simplify IT management across the enterprise for greater business results. The CA Enterprise IT Management vision, proven capability solutions and expertise help customers govern, manage and secure IT. Customers gain the ability to manage risk, improve service, manage costs and align IT investments with the needs of the business.

About Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.Enterprise Management Associates is an advisory and research firm providing market insight to solution providers and technology guidance to Fortune 1000 companies. The EMA™ team is composed of industry respected analysts who deliver strategic awareness about computing and communications infrastructure. Coupling this team of experts with an ever-expanding knowledge repository gives EMA clients an unparalleled advantage against their competition. The firm has published hundreds of articles and books on technology management topics and is frequently requested to share their observations at management forums worldwide.

This report in whole or in part may not be duplicated, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or retransmitted without prior written permission of Enterprise Management Associates. All opinions and estimates herein constitute our judgement as of this date and are subject to change without notice. Product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies.


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