Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) announced a series of applications aimed at streamlining source code and Web content management for distributed development, Web and mainframe environments.
The products, CCC/Harvest, Endevor Webstation and Web CM, are together called the Enterprise Change Management Solution. The three applications will help companies bring applications to market faster, cut development costs, increase productivity of their development teams and aid collaboration across distributed work environments, said Gregory Clancy, brand manager for Application Life Cycle Management at CA, on a conference call Tuesday.
The applications will also help managers oversee program development, as they will set up repeatable development guidelines and rules as well as helping to enforce them, said Melissa Borza, change and configuration management business manager at CA, in a separate interview. Such features help improve products and efficiency, as well as help companies achieve certification from organizations such as the International Standards Organization (ISO), and avoid incorrect changes, she said.
Using CA’s Change Management products, “managers can be sure that changes will be made how they want and expect them to be,” Clancy said during the call.
The company announced the availability of version 5.0 of CCC/Harvest on the call. CCC/Harvest is the company’s distributed development management application and the new version will offer a Web interface, forms automation, detailed audit tracking and more, Clancy said. CCC/Harvest is available worldwide now and runs on Unix, Windows NT and Windows 2000, with Linux support expected within a year. Pricing for the application will be on a per-user basis, but will not be announced more specifically until late this week or early next week, Borza said.
Endevor Webstation provides a Web interface to CA’s existing Endevor application, now at version 3.9, Clancy said, allowing users to access Endevor’s features and information through any Web browser. Endevor is also available now and will be priced based on the size of the mainframe, though again, further pricing information will not be made available until later.
CCC/Harvest and Endevor will be tied together by Enterprise CM, a program that was discussed on the call, but was not announced. Enterprise CM is currently in development and will be released later this year, Borza said. Until then, any companies wanting to integrate CCC/Harvest and Endevor will have to rely on CA’s professional services staff to create a custom implementation, Borza said.
Lastly, Web CM will allow for the management of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) pages and other Web content. The program, which runs on Windows NT and Windows 2000 Server, is currently in beta, but will be available in the next month, Borza said. A client version of the application is built in Java and runs on any Java-compatible system. Web CM will eventually be integrated with Enterprise CM, but is standalone for now, Borza said. WebCM is the new version of the product once known as Raveler and MasterIT, Clancy said.
Enterprise Change Management applications are targeted at any organization with more than two or three developers, any in the Global 2000, companies that may have failed previous software audits or those aiming for certification by standards bodies, Borza said.
One company using CA’s applications is greeting card maker American Greetings Corp. American Greetings has used CA products for nine years, said Tom Brown, source management administrator at American Greetings, on the conference call. The company uses Endevor to manage and maintain its source code and has found the application saves the company both time and money,
he said.
American Greetings used Endevor on its Y2K compliance project and was able to update more than 6 million lines of code without losing one line, Brown said.
Tuesday’s announcements mark the second stage of CA’s managed e-business portfolio, Clancy said. The first came in CA’s early March announcement of the Erwin Modelling Suite which helps companies model their data, objects, component and business processes. Stage three will be the announcement of development tools and the fourth stage will offer process and project management tools, Clancy said.
CA, based in Islandia, New York, can be reached at +1-516-342-5224 or via the Internet at http://www.ca.com/.
