CA Technologies today announced the general availability of CA Workload Automation 11.3, which provides the ability to initiate, monitor and manage workloads in private, public and hybrid clouds for increased agility and better business outcomes.

Supporting an expanded breadth of applications and events, this new version of CA Workload Automation also enables workload cloud bursting and dynamic workload placement that was first demonstrated at VMworld Europe last October.

“Organizations understand that it’s cost-prohibitive to maintain dedicated infrastructure to support peak demands in workload processing. As a result, many of the world’s largest enterprises use CA Workload Automation to process millions of business transactions daily to more cost-effectively run their businesses,” said Roger Pilc, general manager, Virtualization and Automation, CA Technologies. “The new capabilities in this version provide the increased agility customers need to keep up with their ever-growing business demands, and to process more workloads reliably and cost-effectively on all platforms and in all types of environments.”

Key capabilities in CA Workload Automation 11.3 include:

• Support for new applications: CA Workload Automation’s deep integration into the application stack allow for the detection of business events that trigger workloads. Specific enhancements have been added that extend support for managing workloads for web services, J2EE, relational databases, and other components. This deeper integration reduces the need for customers to use costly scripts and other custom integration methods.

• Dynamic workload placement: CA Workload Automation enables customers to quickly move and process workloads in different cloud environments when demand for processing spikes. This makes it possible through dynamic workload placement, enabling customers to quickly provision and process workloads from a physical infrastructure to a virtualized private cloud or to a public cloud such as Amazon EC2.

• Self-service for workload management: CA Workload Automation extends its self-service interface and gives end-users the ability to request and execute workload processing controlled by workload policy and governance processes. End-users no longer need to depend on administrators to make changes as they are now empowered to manage their own workload processing. This helps provide higher levels of efficiency and control, while giving the business more control over their own services.

• Release management for workload automation: CA Workload Automation now automates the process of moving workloads from test and development environments into production. This is done using a policy-driven approach that includes automatic migration of complex configurations from development to production. A large financial institution was able to reduce this process from two weeks to just 20 minutes using the new version of the product.

CA Workload Automation 11.3 reinforces CA Technologies broad application management capabilities, which include configuration management, capacity management, discovery and dependency mapping, performance management, and self-service and administrator provisioning. This growing set of solutions helps customers optimally match dynamic applications and their workloads to increasingly dynamic and virtualized IT infrastructure in a ‘just-in-time’ manner.

“This release of CA Workload Automation adds important new capabilities for customers looking to process a broader set of workloads, and to do so in the cloud,” said Tim Grieser, program vice president, Enterprise System Management Software, IDC. “Dynamic workload management will help customers utilize public, private and hybrid cloud resources to optimize service delivery.”