CA Technologies on Monday announced the general availability of five products in the CA Virtual portfolio, which offer comprehensive management capabilities designed to help increase business agility by providing a better way to provision, control, assure, secure and optimize virtual environments. The five products announced are CA Virtual Assurance, CA Virtual Automation, CA Virtual Configuration, CA Virtual Assurance for Infrastructure Managers, and CA Virtual Privilege Manager. The company also introduced the CA Virtual Foundation Suite, which combines select virtualization management products at a compelling price point.

"The CA Technologies virtualization management portfolio is the ideal fit for customers looking to improve the efficiency, quality, and agility of their virtualized and private cloud environments," said Roger Pilc, general manager of the Virtualization and Automation customer solutions unit at CA Technologies. "Our portfolio is designed from the ground up to deliver new levels of speed and flexibility; anytime, anywhere application development and delivery in a variety of environments; exceptional manageability, service assurance, and security; all of which can help to significantly lower cost and provide a compelling ROI."

Today's offerings from CA Technologies are designed to help eliminate the VM stall faced by many organizations today. After virtualizing the "low-hanging fruit," which typically means the conversion of no more than 20 to 30 percent of physical servers to virtual machines, a variety of factors can conspire to stall progress, including: complex application and infrastructure performance issues, security and compliance concerns, concerns regarding uncontrolled VM sprawl, capacity management complexity, staffing and skill levels.

Many organizations in virtualization stall never manage to virtualize their tier 2, tier 1, and mission-critical systems. Stuck at the first stage on the virtualization maturity curve, these organizations are unable to leverage the entry-level benefits of server consolidation into infrastructure optimization, automation and orchestration, and the promise of a dynamic data center and private cloud. This in turn means that they fail to realize the full scope of benefits from virtualization: not just cost reduction, but also business and IT agility, management efficiency, market responsiveness, service improvements, and staffing benefits.