After submitting an idea I had for community expansion, CA made me customer committee member for CA World 2010.  I mildly participated in event planning, attended pre-conference calls, and had insider information on most CA World happenings.  My primary goal for this event was to network with fellow community officers and members and expand user community participation.  Secondary, I wanted to learn the CA Clarity roadmap, explore cloud computing, and get an understanding for CA’s role, if any, in social media and collaboration.

The Big News: CA is now ‘CA Technologies’ and is investing heavily in SaaS.

The CA Regional Exchange (CARE) was fantastic.  In fact, the networking aspect of my visit went very well.  I was able to attend invite-only meetings with CA community management, business analysts, and web developers on CA’s new online portal.  Because I am an advocate on social media and enterprise collaboration in general, CA also asked me to participate in an open forum discussion.  It was the most rewarding aspect of the conference for me.  I knew I had made some good points throughout the hour-long discussion when multiple attendees, from different countries, either messaged me or chatted with me, lending positive remarks about my points.  In one reply I had made, I received applause.  The topics I brought up included social media strategy and personal branding.  The venue was on a stage with about 130 in attendance.  I’m the guy in the chair to the far right below.

Social Media Discussion

From my perspective, it does seem as if CA Technologies is focusing as an organization on customer satisfaction and fulfillment.  From a community perspective and even product perspective, CA is listening to their customers, as they are clearly enhancing the Clarity application based on user feedback.  CA marketing is greatly pushing two mantras or themes.  One being ‘partner’ not a vendor, the other being, ‘we can’.  CA is also leaping into cloud computing as that topic was the hottest of the conference.  They are growing their SaaS offerings and the majority of their new customers are choosing SaaS solutions.  For those not familiar, CA has branded their SaaS offerings as On-Demand.  ie. CA Clarity PPM On-Demand vs. CA Clarity PPM

Clarity and the word Kilimanjaro never came up.  I could tell based on attending CA World 2008 that MUCH had changed in the user interface and CA was greatly expanding usability, simplicity, and integration.  In Clarity 12.1, the next major release set for the end of August, is including a new graphical interface that sits on top of Xog and allows drag and drop like table matching from an SAP database to the Clarity database.  The goal would be to build xml feeds using SAP or Oracle templates as needed.  For Clarity v13 and On Demand, the user interface has changed and includes a larger footprint as the left side navigation menu auto hides when you’re not using it, the binocular browse is gone as you click in a cell, begin typing and it autosenses the value you’re looking for.  Overall, there are multiple user interface enhancements and I’ll need to obtain CA documentation on in order to specify them in greater detail.  One breakthrough I had at CA World was in regard to dashboards that call web services, connect to external and internal data, and then display the information needed.  I spoke to a local vendor out of New Jersey that specializes in the dashboard creation and web service connections.  Although using web service calls to another database is more of a tactical decision, rather then importing the data into the Clarity database directly, from a visibility perspective, it may be best to explore the use of web services as they can help in automation, productivity, and even increase data visibility.

Clarity’s release model has changed.  CA understands the complexity in putting out quarterly releases for on-premise customers.  As a result, customers who do NOT subscribe to the SaaS solution will only receive major product updates and releases annually.  I’m assuming hot fixes would be thrown into that mix as needed but in most if not all cases, CA would not want or ask their on-premise customers to install their own updates throughout the year.  For Clarity On Demand, CA manages and publishes all changes.  With On Demand, CA will auto release 3-4 updates per year and also align major releases at the exact time an on-premise customer would receive their release, keeping major releases in synch.  The advantage for the On Demand customer would be, they get the latest and greatest enhancements first, they have a 24/7 web or cloud environment, and no disaster recovery worries.  CA with a SaaS solution does all technical management of the application environments.  This allows the customer to focus on ‘doing’, not managing.  With that in mind, I’m not sure if Clarity On Demand is something that aligns to my organization’s needs but we will investigate it.  As such, I’m going to get a 30-day Clarity On Demand trial setup that includes the new user interface for us to test out.  Note, Clarity 12.1 will NOT have the new interface, only the On Demand product will.  CA will release the new interface to on-premise customers with Clarity v13 set for spring (June) 2011.

Summary:

CA World 2010 was good, the keynotes given by James Cameron and CA management were awesome, and the Maroon 5 concert topped it all off.  I found myself running to session after session, meeting after meeting, and there was actually too much to do.  That’s a bad thing for me because I missed many things I wanted to participate in and research.  The CA Regional Exchange (CARE) was by far the biggest reward I got from the event and if the opportunity is there next time, I would like to only attend CARE and not CA World.  Because I have been fortunate to go two years in a row, I’d rather send a co-worker in my place for the next one.  As long as I am a leader in the user communities, I will continue to attend CARE which runs over a weekend.  I did tweet a lot from CA World, and users of Twitter can follow the hashtags #CAWorld and #CA_RE to read countless ‘live’ posts made by many event attendees including myself.  People tweeted in the middle of sessions as they learned product information, they tweeted quotes from the keynote speakers, pics from the concert, you name it.  It was awesome and even made the Twitter people into a tight knit group.  Using Twitter at an event was a great way to meet people as well as take notes on the event.  I’ve written this entire summary without even reading through my Twitter timeline.  I’m going to see if I can extract or report on my Twitter timeline and attach it to this summary, maybe as an additional post.  It’s an innovative look at event participation and a very fast way to record notes and share them with the world in an instant.  Why do I love that opportunity?  It allows the people who can’t attend CA World to follow what’s happening based on tweets.  I could stay home, follow hashtags on Twitter for the next CA World and learn an awful lot about CA’s product news and information, speakers, and celebrations.  Lastly, I’m going to try and get PowerPoint copies of all event sessions.  I’m guessing for legal reasons I shouldn’t share those though.  CA World 2010 was great.  It was the best IT or technology event I have ever attended and contributed to.

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