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CA Reporting with SAP BusinessObjects Solutions
1. SAP OEM Partner Success Story
High Tech
CA Technologies
ROBUST REPORTING WITH SAP® BusinessObjects™ SOLUTIONS
“Moving to SAP BusinessObjects
solutions was a strategic decision for
CA Technologies. . . . Using the same
tool across multiple products reduces
our customers’ costs and speeds the
time it takes them to create their own
customized reports.”
Don LeClair, Senior Vice President of Research
and Development, CA Technologies
Implementation Highlights
Installing SAP BusinessObjects solutions
in the CA Mainframe Center of Excellence
enhanced development efficiency, saving
implementation time and expediting its
ability to roll out embedded functionality for
numerous products.
Why SAP
• Broad offering that spans enterprise infor-
mation management, reporting, analytics,
and enterprise performance management
• Rich functionality, flexible reporting, and
the ability to encapsulate both structured
and unstructured data
Benefits
• Flexible report design, customization, and
centralized report creation support devel-
opment efficiencies such as reusable code.
• CA 7 Workload Automation server embeds
SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise software
for consistent reporting and analytics.
• Embedded software and integrated infor-
mation across products, including integra-
tion with document management systems,
improve manageability and enable a con-
sistent end-user experience.
Company
• Name: CA Technologies
• Location: Islandia, New York
• Industry: High tech – software
• Products and services: IT management
and security solutions
• Revenue: US$4.35 billion (2010)
• Employees: 13,200
• Web site: www.ca.com
Challenges and Opportunities
• Streamline disparate reporting and
business intelligence (BI) functionality
across numerous product lines
• Establish a robust and consistent
reporting and BI infrastructure
Objectives
• Deliver consistent reporting and analytics
functions across CA Technologies product
lines
• Simplify reporting with flexible report
design and customization
• Integrate management processes, data,
and user interfaces
SAP® Solutions and Services
• SAP® BusinessObjects™ XI solutions,
including SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise
software and a business intelligence portal
• SAP Crystal Reports® software
• SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence®
software
QUICK FACTS
2. The vision of CA Technologies includes
a standardized business intelligence
(BI) and reporting platform – something
that previously eluded the company,
with diverse product offerings tapping
into a range of disparate BI tools, tech-
nologies, and reporting options. Cus-
tomers using multiple CA Technologies
products encountered numerous
reporting motifs, each with its own
quirks and capabilities. In addition to
being a challenge for customers, the
reporting inconsistencies from product
to product precluded development
efficiencies, such as reusable code.
Simplifying Reporting Across
Product Lines
Faced with these challenges, CA
Technologies sought to simplify its
reporting solutions, unify the customer
experience, and deliver consistent
reporting and analytics functionalities
across its product lines.
Don LeClair, senior vice president of
research and development and a distin-
guished engineer at CA Technologies,
explains, “Our goal was to come up
with a leading-edge, quality reporting
platform with state-of-the-art function-
ality.” Accordingly, CA Technologies
put SAP® BusinessObjects™ solutions
through an extensive evaluation process.
The company’s lengthy list of require-
ments included platform and infrastruc-
ture compatibility, access to diverse
data sources, scalability and perfor-
mance, flexible formatting and output,
support for multiple languages, and
security. Essential ingredients also
included support for a metadata layer,
flexible report design and customization
capabilities, the ability to integrate
with document management systems,
and manageability. Additionally, CA
Technologies required OEM-suitable
software for embedding reporting
functionality in its solutions.
Ultimately, CA Technologies selected
SAP BusinessObjects XI solutions,
which include a business intelligence (BI)
portal, SAP Crystal Reports® software
for sophisticated report development,
and SAP BusinessObjects Web
Intelligence® software for Web-based
reporting and analytics. For CA Tech-
nologies, the robust reporting function-
ality of the SAP solutions is a differenti-
ator. Roya Montazeri, director of product
management at CA Technologies, says,
“We chose SAP BusinessObjects BI
solutions because of the richness of
the reporting engine.” LeClair agrees,
noting that the SAP BusinessObjects
portfolio meets the vision and criteria
of CA Technologies for leading-edge
enterprise IT management solutions.
Building a BI Center of Excellence
To facilitate deployment of its new
solution, CA Technologies established
a BI center of excellence. Composed
of a dedicated staff, the center of
excellence designs and develops
SAP BusinessObjects BI reports for
many CA Technologies product lines,
selected according to where they are
on product road map and development
cycles. LeClair says, “The center of
excellence expedites successful deploy-
ments for its customers. Our developers
know the tools really well, they’re highly
productive, and they provide reporting
as a service back to the development
teams.”
CA Technologies focuses on helping customers develop cohesive
yet simple IT management solutions. With a sweeping product line
that includes a mix of internally developed and acquired products,
CA Technologies has a vision for unifying and simplifying IT
management for enterprises, so organizations are better positioned
to manage risk, improve services, control costs, and align IT with
the business. CA Technologies’ enterprise IT management vision
invokes a service-oriented architectural platform that integrates
management processes, data, and user interfaces.
3. “Defining a platform that’s reusable across all CA Technologies products
is an internal benefit to our vision of having a solution that can share
technologies. SAP BusinessObjects solutions allow us to do this.”
Depending on the type of reporting
a client needs, CA Technologies
embeds SAP Crystal Reports or
SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence
software. Montazeri says, “For product
teams that are specifically looking
for ad hoc reporting, we embed SAP
BusinessObjects Web Intelligence
software. However, products with
extended data sources mostly use
SAP Crystal Reports, partly because
integration to the CA Technologies
application is richer with SAP Crystal
Reports software.”
Differentiating with Rapid, Robust
Reporting and Reusability
CA Technologies sees multiple bene-
fits, including a platform that is reus-
able across all our products. Montazeri
says, “Defining a platform that’s
reusable across all CA Technologies
products is an internal benefit to our
vision of having a solution that can share
technologies. SAP BusinessObjects
solutions allow us to do this.” She notes
that installing SAP BusinessObjects
solutions in the center of excellence
has helped the product team save time
in terms of implementation and content
delivery. LeClair adds, “The center
of excellence expedites the ability of
CA Technologies to roll out embedded
functions for the different products.
We’ve had strong and positive responses
to having a group of professionals that
can deliver content quickly and effi-
ciently for the development teams.”
Taking advantage of the metadata layer
is also a plus. Montazeri says, “Our
ultimate goal is to define a metadata
layer across multiple products so we
can leverage reports within different
CA Technologies products and bring a
bigger value, in terms of content, to the
user that has multiple CA Technologies
products.”
Focusing on the Customer
Experience
SAP BusinessObjects solutions enrich
the focus for CA Technologies on the
customer experience. LeClair says,
“Part of our implementation now is
looking at the user experience around
each report – making sure the look
and feel is appropriate, the interface
of the report is easy to use, and that
we’re aggregating good and useful
information.” CA Technologies also
continues to focus on the actual
content of the report, making sure it’s
delivering what’s needed. “Working
with the product managers, we aim to
improve the quality of content as well
as the tools. We focus on providing
integrated reporting and information
to help people who use our products
do a better job,” says LeClair. “We
give them more information and better
analysis for their management domain.”
By embedding SAP BusinessObjects
Enterprise software, the CA 7 Workload
Automation server further enhances
customer experience by offering a
consistent look and feel to end users.
Enjoying Flexible Reporting
Options
Flexible, easy-to-use reporting
options are also a boon. “With SAP
BusinessObjects solutions, we benefit
from richer reports and an engine that
supports greater functionality that our
clients can enjoy and use to solve their
business problems,” says Montazeri.
LeClair adds, “Customers like what they
see in terms of the look and feel and
the kinds of reports they’re able to
produce.” He notes that customers like
the interactivity of SAP BusinessObjects
Web Intelligence, as do developers.
“There is a lot of interest in CA Tech-
nologies about SAP BusinessObjects
Web Intelligence because of its interac-
tive nature, which is not something
we’ve had in many of our products in
the past,” he says.
“With SAP BusinessObjects solutions, we benefit from richer reports and an
engine that supports greater functionality that our clients can enjoy and use
to solve their business problems.”
Roya Montazeri, Director of Product Management, CA Technologies
Roya Montazeri, Director of Product Management, CA Technologies