To All:
City of Sarasota Selects CA's
Unicenter TNG for Centralized Management of Enterprise Resources
ISLANDIA, N.Y.--(BUSINESS
WIRE)--December 15, 1997--Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA) today announced that the City of Sarasota, Fla. has chosen CA's Unicenter TNG to achieve centralized management of the local government's technology infrastructure. The City will deploy CA's award-winning enterprise management solution to reduce costs, improve service levels, enhance user productivity, and enforce interdepartmental technology standards.
According to Mary Scott, director of information systems and technology for the City of Sarasota, Unicenter TNG was chosen as part of a far-reaching technology modernization initiative. CA's end-to-end enterprise management solution will also play a major role in helping her organization establish a high technology identity for the Sarasota area.
"When people think of technology, we want them to think of the City of Sarasota," said Scott. "Basically, we are trying to get to a virtual world, and we will be managing it from a centralized environment using Unicenter TNG. We will be using all modules available to provide a higher level of service to end-user departments. Unicenter TNG will help us do more with what we have."
Unicenter TNG was chosen over several other enterprise management
products, all of which failed to address the City's complete IT management concerns. "We had been looking only at small-scale products that only allowed us to do things like dial-up remote control," said Scott. "We soon realized that these products were inherently non-scalable and did not equip us with the capabilities we would need to grow."
The City had already implemented HP's OpenView management platform, but it failed to deliver an adequate level of integration. IBM/Tivoli was also eliminated from consideration early on, based in large part on Scott's prior experience with the product. "They have thrown a lot of money at Tivoli, but it doesn't have the same level of integration as Unicenter TNG," said Scott.
The City of Sarasota was impressed with Unicenter TNG from the very beginning. Having implemented numerous IT projects for the City, Bay Resources - a Unicenter TNG reseller and CA business partner - conducted an initial demonstration of the solution's robust features and capabilities, and ultimately spearheaded its implementation just four weeks after the contracts were signed. The preliminary deployment of Unicenter TNG will take just 10 days.
"Bay Resources was knowledgeable and well-trained in Unicenter TNG, and showed us that Unicenter TNG was a total solution that could scale as we needed it to," said Scott. "We also knew that CA would continue to put a lot of development effort into the product to keep it current with changing technology."
Scott believes that Unicenter TNG is a key requirement for realizing the City's ambitious goals for government technology. "To achieve the level of efficiency we need to have in city government, we have to move forward to a process-oriented model for doing things."
Unicenter TNG's cross-platform support was also key to its selection. The City of Sarasota's technology environment currently comprises over 350 desktops running Microsoft Windows 95, all connected into seven Novell LANs. A TCP/IP network interconnects the LANs with an IBM AS/400 midrange used for utility billing services. A Hewlett-Packard 3000 server, which hosts records management, financial applications and administrative programs, is also connected to the network.
Scott's organization plans to make extensive use of Unicenter TNG's Business Process Views, which enable network and system resources to be organized as components of a logical business process and presented to IT managers in an easy-to-understand display.
"Unicenter TNG provides a solution that enables robust monitoring and troubleshooting of our key processes," said Scott. "We will extensively use Unicenter TNG's business process viewing capability to identify situations and become more proactive - recognizing and resolving issues before they become big problems."
In addition, Sarasota's IT enterprise incorporates a variety of dial-up and dedicated connections serving nine sites throughout the city. In the future, Sarasota's IS and technology group plans to provide services to outside entities, and to incorporate desktops and servers from those parties. The variety of servers and networks involved, and the anticipated growth of the overall enterprise made Unicenter TNG's scalable, cross-platform management support highly desirable.
Unicenter TNG's asset management functionality was also appealing to Scott. "With so much installed hardware, we were looking for an efficient way to track everything we have deployed, to plan for its obsolescence, and to work it all into a master plan for re-engineering and upgrades."
With a constantly growing end-user community encompassing hundreds of workstations, the City also considered Unicenter TNG's ability to remotely deliver software vitally important. By providing an efficient, centralized method for loading applications, upgrades and patches, Unicenter TNG will be instrumental in reducing the costs of ownership associated with the government's technology infrastructure.
Scott believes Unicenter TNG's comprehensive automation features will substantially improve the productivity of her staff. "Unicenter TNG will let me run a tight ship. Instead of spending time on routine maintenance and administration, my people will be able to focus on work that generates revenue." CA technology will eventually help the City of Sarasota's IT department provide technology services for other local governments and businesses. The City is targeting small towns in the area, county government agencies, and organizations like the Chamber of Commerce to become part of its network, and to use its services. Ultimately, the goal is to grow the department into a profit-oriented service center.
"As the number of 'service customers' for our organization grows,
Unicenter TNG's Advanced Help Desk will become increasingly important," said Scott. "There is already an immediate need for Unicenter TNG's Single Sign-On module. It will be a real benefit for the majority of our users who now have to remember five or six different passwords just to get around."
Unicenter TNG is an integrated enterprise management solution that enables organizations to manage all IT resources, encompassing heterogeneous networks, systems, applications, and databases. It provides comprehensive end-to-end enterprise management for TCP/IP, SNA, IPX/SPX and DECnet networks, and 40 platforms including desktops, Windows NT, UNIX, AS/400, NetWare and mainframe environments.
Unicenter TNG is the only fully integrated management solution covering network discovery, topology, performance, events and status, security, software distribution, storage, workload, help desk, change management and other functions for traditional and distributed computing environments, as well as for the Internet and intranets. Unicenter TNG's intelligent manager/agent technology delivers highly scalable management of the entire computing environment, including hardware and software.
Computer Associates International, Inc. (NYSE: CA), with headquarters in Islandia, N.Y., is the world leader in mission-critical business software. The company develops, licenses and supports more than 500 integrated products that include enterprise computing and information management, application development, manufacturing and financial applications. CA has over 10,000 people in 160 offices in 40 countries and had revenue of $4 billion in fiscal
year 1997. CA can be reached by visiting cai.com on the World Wide Web, emailing info@cai.com or calling 1-516-342-5224. -0-
All referenced product names are trademarks of their respective
companies.
CONTACT:
Computer Associates International, Inc.
Kathy Gargano, 516/342-4067
garka04@cai.com |
