CA Technologies Helps Customers Significantly Reduce Mainframe Costs with Innovative New Release of CA XCOM Data Transport

ISLANDIA, N.Y., Aug. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- CA Technologies (Nasdaq: CA) today announced a new release of CA XCOM™ Data Transport® for z/OS (CA XCOM), designed to help customers control costs and improve operational efficiency while securely transferring high volumes of critical data.   Demonstrating an ongoing investment in managed file transfer technology, the latest improvements were engineered to help prevent problems, speed data transport, and provide significant productivity gains in installation, deployment and maintenance.

The new release also leverages CA Technologies innovative Mainframe 2.0 strategy, including its adoption of CA Mainframe Software Manager (CA MSM) — which automates and simplifies the installation, maintenance and deployment of CA XCOM — and health checks that help streamline management, and save time and money by preventing costly disruptions during file transmission.  

Based on tests of CA MSM support, data transfer performance, and CPU overhead conducted by customers and CA Technologies*, CA XCOM is expected to contribute to cost-cutting initiatives through performance and operational efficiency improvements.

"Transferring files can be complex and risky.  The complexity is created by unfriendly user interfaces and send/receive problems.  The risk is created by failure to meet security requirements and poor management of files that are transferred," said Joe Clabby, president of Clabby Analytics. "CA XCOM for z/OS has been designed to mitigate these problems by providing a secure environment for transferring files and through integration with CA Mainframe 2.0 technology."

Clabby continued, "With CA XCOM for z/OS, enterprises can feel more comfortable about meeting their compliance requirements, and with performance improvements, they can do this faster than possible before."

Highlights of the new release include:

• Up to 30-40 percent performance improvements on z/OS file transfers, resulting in significant reductions in CPU usage and cost savings, based on CA Technologies lab tests and reports from beta customers.*
• Enhanced, trusted transfers that exploit the latest innovations in security and password protection capabilities to provide the needed balance between flexibility and maximum data privacy.
• Support for CA MSM that dramatically reduces CA XCOM installation, maintenance and deployment time.  CA Technologies lab tests resulted in time savings of up to 85% when installing and maintaining CA XCOM, and up to 82% time savings when deploying the product.*
• New health checks that monitor CA XCOM file transfers and proactively flag potential problems before they cause operational disruptions.
• Quick and easy z/OS history record generation, which provides detailed information on scheduled file transfers to enhance data analysis, trouble shooting and auditing.
• Support for HFS and zFS file systems to expand CA XCOM's ability to move data safely and efficiently between multiple platforms.

"With these latest improvements to CA XCOM, we are delivering enhancements that extend flexibility, performance and overall value to our customers," said Mark Combs, distinguished senior vice president, for CA Technologies Mainframe Customer Solutions Unit. "The new release offers innovative ways to help IT reliably transfer high volumes of data, reports and jobs, and provides the highest levels of security and privacy across multiple platforms, to meet business needs and support compliance initiatives."

One example of beta customer feedback came from a large retailer in the United Kingdom. The company completes, on average, 790,000 transfers per week of critical pricing and product information between headquarters and thousands of stores throughout the UK.  Their tests resulted in an immediate performance improvement and reduced CPU usage by up to 40 percent. In many cases, such a large CPU savings can help control costs by delaying the need for a hardware upgrade.

CA XCOM is designed to provide high-performance, reliable data transfer across a wide variety of platforms, including z/OS, Linux, Linux on System z, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, AS/400, Windows platforms and OpenVMS.  It offers data encryption for enhanced data protection and privacy over public networks, data compression and record packing. CA XCOM is architected to deliver increased bandwidth, automatic checkpoint, and restart and recovery, to safeguard data in case of transmission failure, application level acknowledgements between systems for data integrity, and extensive audit log and problem determination capabilities.

For more information on CA XCOM, please visit http://www.ca.com/us/data-transport.aspx.

*The beta test results are based upon CA Technologies experience with the referenced products in a variety of development and customer environments.  Past performance of the software products in such development environments is not indicative of the future performance of such software products in identical, similar or different environments. The time savings for installation, maintenance and deployment of CA XCOM was benchmarked by CA internally against the time it took an expert user and a novice user to perform the same functions through electronic software delivery.

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About CA Technologies

CA Technologies (Nasdaq: CA) is an IT management software and solutions company with expertise across all IT environments – from mainframe and distributed, to virtual and cloud. CA Technologies manages and secures IT environments and enables customers to deliver more flexible IT services. CA Technologies innovative products and services provide the insight and control essential for IT organizations to power business agility. The majority of the Global Fortune 500 relies on CA Technologies to manage evolving IT ecosystems. For additional information, visit CA Technologies at www.ca.com.

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Copyright © 2010 CA. All Rights Reserved. One CA Plaza, Islandia, N.Y. 11749. All trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries. IBM and z/OS are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. All other trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. Solaris is a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.

SOURCE CA Technologies

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