CA stands at the dawn of 'The Management Age'

Computer Associates has marked the dawn of what it is calling 'The Management Age' with the unveiling of its Enterprise Infrastructure Management (EIM) strategy.

Key to this grandiose announcement of a 'Management Age' is the elevation of consolidating, standardising, better understanding and utilising existing assets to become a company's top priorities. And according to a range of analyst figures compiled by CA, the Management Age will create a market worth $43bn by 2007.

The EIM products are designed to create greater transparency across a company's IT infrastructure, flag up inefficiencies, track assets and ensure security and business continuity.

Speaking at the company's CA World conference in Las Vegas, Mark Barrenechea, senior vice president of product development at Computer Associates, said companies are currently mired in a costly network complexity of their own making.

Barrenechea claimed some companies may have as many as 100,000 or 200,000 assets plugging into their network, ranging from servers to applications – but many CIOs lost control of exactly what creates such high numbers long ago.

"You must better use what you already have. And using everything you already have first means finding it," said Barrenechea. He cited the case of one customer, the Arizona Electric Power Cooperative, who made considerable savings on new storage hardware following a full asset inventory which showed there was already the desired capacity in place if used more cleverly.

The situation could be likened to the importance of tracking any assets within an organisation. Buying more storage hardware when a company is yet to maximise what it already has is no different to that company buying more office furniture having forgotten there are a thousand unused desks and chairs in storage offsite.

Similarly, why hire a new salesperson when the current sales team of 10 are only working at 60 per cent efficiency?

If anything the issues with technology is that those long-forgotten 'nooks and crannies', or underutilised assets tend to be far less obvious and potentially far more costly.

In a live demonstration of the EIM product Barrenechea showed how the number of desktops can be tracked in an instant, revealing how many are managed, how many have come into use or gone out of use and how many are being used efficiently. Similar breakdowns can reveal usage and related costs across an organisation.

The switch to such tight management represents a major shift in the role of the CIO but Barrenechea said it is no longer acceptable for IT infrastructure not to be "managed with fiscal discipline".