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CA Launches Portal To Fight 'Virtual Stall'
A new microsite from CA Technologies aims to help its partners sell the CA Virtual portfolio and its customers to overcome what CA calls "virtual stall."
According to CA, virtual stall typically occurs after customers have virtualized about 30 percent of their servers.
"Beyond this [stall] point, organizations tend to struggle with issues of scale -- lack of staff and skills, higher costs, poor visibility, compliance challenges, licensing issues, business risks, et cetera," said Andi Mann, CA's vice president of product marketing, in a phone interview this week.
At the 30 percent-mark, for instance, a company may decide not to trust its critical applications to a virtualized environment. Similarly, the company may realize that it lacks the staff required to expand the deployment further. For many organizations, Mann said, these challenges often result in virtualization projects either slowing down or stalling altogether.
"This is where CA technologies and our channel partners can really bring fast, strong benefits to our customers," Mann said in explaining how getting past that 30 percent barrier was a driver for the CA microsite, the Partner Solution Center, which launched this month.
The site provides access to sales presentations, training materials, product user guides, demos and other assets that are designed to help partners promote CA virtualization products to their clients.
The Partner Solution Center is aimed specifically at partners serving mid-market enterprises, which CA defines as companies with revenues between $300 million and $2 billion. According to Mann, CA has historically focused on "mega-global" companies or small businesses, not mid-market companies.
"[The Partner Solution Center] is an opportunity for CA Technologies to reach into new markets, drive significant incremental revenue [and] execute on a new market opportunity with our channel partners," Mann said.
In the future, additional assets such as branding materials will be made available on the Partner Solution Center, he added.
The CA Virtual portfolio is a suite of virtualization management products, including CA Virtual Assurance, CA Virtual Automation, CA Virtual Configuration and CA Virtual Privilege Manager. All of CA's virtualization products support Microsoft and VMware virtual environments. However, some products in the portfolio support other environments, including Amazon EC2 and XenServer. Until June 30, CA partners and customers can buy up to 25 physical sockets of its Virtual Assurance, Virtual Automation or Virtual Configuration products for the price of one full year of maintenance.