CA Reaches New Dimension With Unicenter TND

SAN MATEO (03/27/2000) - Users can now kick the tires on Computer Associates' Unicenter TND (The Next Dimension), the company's upcoming incarnation of its systems and network management platform which is now available in a beta test release for selected sites.

As part of last week's beta announcement, CA is promising bigger and better things with Unicenter TND, including significant upgrades to visualization and time-destination components shipping in the current product, Unicenter TNG (The Next Generation), said Alan Anderson, vice president of business management at CA.

Anderson said Unicenter TND allows users to view and manage their e-business infrastructure much in the same way that Unicenter TNG provides a comprehensive look into IT environments.

Increased intelligence of CA's Neugent neural networking technology is responsible for increased speed and response time in Unicenter TND, according to company officials. Neugent "learns" system and network behavior and then detects and predicts problems, including outages, slowdowns, intrusion attempts, and virus attacks.

The product will enable users to take advantage of CA's effort to integrate the concept of human factors within the managing processes and transactions in a business-to-business or business-to-consumer environment, said Steve Foote, an analyst at Enswers.com, in Boston.

"It is so difficult to manage a large-scale environment," Foote said. "CA has built a nice way for users to interface with their products and any management tool they choose. That's very important."

Foote said he liked the fact that Unicenter TND was built using CA's Jasmine object database infrastructure. This technology should provide network and IT managers with easier time management and configuration attributes of the platform by providing more clearly defined pattern matching.

"A big problem is systems administrators don't comprehend 80 percent of the functionalities in the systems they manage today," Foote noted. "TND takes away a lot of the barriers for understanding the use of that technology."

Unicenter TND employs a real-world interface that shows managers the status and interoperability of systems operations over time, using a VCR-like control panel that enables review of previous performance and likely future performance, as well as anticipated failures, throughout the entire e-business environment.

"A key feature of (Unicenter TND) is the ability to transform data into information," said Michael Dortch, a senior research analyst at the Robert Frances Group, in Westport, Conn. "The result is an optimized user's experience."

CA officials said the Enterprise Management Portal of Unicenter TND will allow users to personalize the Web-based portal to deliver information of specific interest and need to their businesses. The new product also includes greater "plug-in" security products covering intrusion detection, anti-virus, content inspection, and firewall software. It also has improved quality of service and prioritization features.

Computer Associates International Inc., in Islandia, N.Y., is at www.cai.com.

Nancy Weil, a Boston correspondent for the IDG News Service, an InfoWorld affiliate, contributed to this report.