Microsoft Server Virtualization and Management

versus CA Technologies
Competitive Discussion Guide- May 2014
Introduction

products, what they need to acquire to complement their portfolios, and what they need
to shed or put on the back burner.

This discussion guide provides guidance for Microsoft field sales representatives to
discuss customer concerns about server and cloud environment management and how
solutions from Microsoft can help address those concerns. This document provides
information and facts to help field sales representatives compete effectively against the
Cloud solutions from CA Technologies. Use this guide to:
Initiate sales conversations with technical decision makers (TDMs) and business
decision makers (BDMs) to identify sales opportunities.
Understand key messages and strategies for positioning Microsoft Hyper-V and
Microsoft System Center.
Sell Microsoft System Center against the Cloud solutions from CA Technologies.
Use this discussion guide in conversations with:
TDMs: Information Technology (IT) Administrators, IT Managers (IT Implementers),
VP of IT, Director of Technology, Director of IT, and Chief Architect
BDMs: President, CEO, Chairman, and COO

1 | IT Operations Management Market Land Escape

Historically, the ITOM landscape has been dominated by four vendors: BMC Software, CA
Technologies, HP, and IBM. Gartner refers to these vendors as the Big Four. These
vendors continue to expand their portfolios through acquisitions and some organic
investments. However, software infrastructure vendors like Microsoft and VMware are
also broadening their portfolios to include management solutions that provide deepstack management. This shift in the management vendor landscape brings new
challenges to IT organizations to assess the breadth and depth of management solutions
or suites to determine when and where best-of-breed, good-enough and portfolio
integration are trade-offs worth making.

2 | The ITOM Big Four at a Glance

Strength

Their rich portfolio allows them to successfully compete in tactical sales with point
solutions and in strategic sales as IT preferred partners. Their typical operating mode is
not to innovate directly but to determine the next direction in which to take the market
and to acquire either the innovators that are spearheading the trends or the
specialists that will help them increase their customer base. The mega vendors have the
money and the market presence to push current and next-generation products.
Consequently, they must base their strategies on the management of their product
portfolios and on the effective diffusion of their market strategy: where to sell their
2013 Microsoft Corporation | Confidential | For Microsoft Internal Use Only

Microsoft Server

Weakness

Opportunity

Threats

BMCs IT
The potential BMC has a
BMCs main
management
to execute on golden
competitors
strategy is
the strategy is opportunity to will try to
addressing the impaired by
reinvent itself take
consumerizatio the current
as an
advantage of
n and the
portfolios
innovative
the current
industrialization acquired
company, in
privatization
of IT; it is
solutions
line with the situation in
addressing new which are now past
the short
and old
showing their successful
term by
challenges and age and which introduction of spreading
is working on
are difficult to BSM and
breakdown
simplifying the discard given Remedy.
rumors. BMC
needed
BMC installed The company should
solution.
base.
needs to shift strengthen
Portfolios to aid
to the model its PR
IT organizations
of allowing
campaign
in their
innovation to about the
transformation
happen via
companys
to the next
acquiring
future and
stage of
innovative
its motives
maturity.
and smart
for going
people rather private.
than
code,
and The typical
CA owns a solid CA has
CA
has
a clear
portfolio based difficulty
opportunity to innovative
on strategic
encapsulating accompany
and agile
acquisitions and a good and
customers
entrants are
an ability to
solid portfolio evolving from as much a
capitalize on
into a clear
traditional IT threat
them.
strategic
to BT over the as they are
Its solutions are marketing
years by using for the
innovative
message.
its multiple
other big
depending on
capabilities,
four
product and
from Nimsoft vendors.
portfolio; its
to large
strength lies
enterprise
with the
solutions.
combination of
products and
their integration
across
the IT
The current
The portfolio Now that HP As with its
strength o f
HPs IT
management
portfolio is the
application
performance
management
solution.

as a whole
Software has big
appears a bit overcome its four vendor
dusty and is acquisition
brethren, the
not really
difficulties, we major threat
supported by expect it to
comes from
a strong
recover and
agile
marketing
start
innovators.
vision.
innovating
Reminiscing again.
about past
Crossstrategies
divisional
such as BAC cooperation
and others
and
does not help. capitalization

IBMs core
The strategy IBMs IT
As with the
strategy
pushes new
management other big
focuses on new solutions
strategy
four vendors,
disruptive
toward
focuses on
the door is
technology
systems of
new trends
open to
management
engagement and the
smaller
(cloud, mobile, while
transformation innovators
etc.) while
acknowledgingof IT into BT. that address
optimizing the the role of
This will
traditional
management of systems of
certainly agreeneeds in the
legacy systems record.
with the top IT short term.
of record.
However, the organizations.
transition from
one focus to
the other
requires a
strategy that
abstracts the
complexity of
legacy

3 | Competitor Overview: CA
Technologies: living off its legacy
mainframe software
CA is a $4.5B software firm and is the 2nd
largest ITOM software vendor*
CA is an example of a company that used an
acquisition strategy as a stepping stone to build
innovative and complete solutions to address the
whole life cycle of service management and
automation. CA, like its competitors, has centered its
plans on mobility and cloud but makes an extensive
use of its unified service model approach to create
solutions that should appeal to the large enterprises
going through a transformation cycle and that use IT
as a source of innovation. CA has intelligently left
Nimsoft as a separate entity to address smaller
enterprises either directly or through managed service
providers.

A | CA: Attempting to stem a long

term decline

YoY total revenue decline of 4%: CA projecting 1%

decline FY14
Mainframe solutions comprise over 50% of revenue
and nearly 90% of operating margin; The firm lives off
mainframe renewals
Announced restructuring May 8, 2013; 1200
employees affected
CAs employee base declined from 15.3K in FY05 to
13.6K in FY13
CA doesnt lead any distributed ITOM individual mkt.
segments*

B | Current Company Situation:

Stable, but Weak

Mainframe profits fund the company, but the

mainframe market is slowly declining
The company is struggling because very little of their
revenue comes from virtualization and cloud
management which are the main sources of IT market
growth.

2014 Microsoft Corporation | Confidential | For Microsoft Internal Use Only

CA hired Mike Gregoire, former CEO of Taleo, in Dec.

2012
Goal to sell more ITOM via SaaS model, yet current
CAs products are not architected for SaaS delivery

C | CAs Cloud Management Strategy

Two different offerings have caused confusion: one

internally developed is called Automation Suite for Clouds
(ASC) and a second is the result of an acquisition of 3-Tera
and their AppLogic cloud management platform

Automation Suite for Clouds (ASC) is offered to

enterprises and service providers. It is a cloud service
delivery and automation platform and includes out-ofthe-box, pre-integrated workflows for standard IaaS
use cases. It overlays heterogeneous physical (Linux,
UNIX, Windows) and virtual (VMware, Hyper-V, Xen)
infrastructures, as well as public and private clouds
(Amazon EC2 or AppLogic).
AppLogic: provides a single platform for Managed
Service Providers (MSPs) to offer a range of business
service offerings, from Software-as-a-Service to Virtual
Private Data Centers. AppLogic capabilities include a
fabric-based infrastructure in software, which enables
service providers to implement offerings on top of a
complete commodity infrastructure. CA is trying to
reposition AppLogic for the service provider market.

D | CAs long history with large

enterprises
CA was founded in 1976 and initially focused on supplying
main- frame management software. In the 1980s CA
added security management and database management
solutions to its portfolio and in the 90s CA began selling
software to manage distributing computing environments
including UNIX and Windows. It was also during this time
that CA began to obtain a bad reputation for acquiring
firms and then reducing the acquired firms investment in
R&D and increasing the software maintenance costs to
customers.
In 2004, in the aftermath of an accounting scandal, CA
hired John Swainson (former head of IBM WebSphere)
as CEO. Swainson worked to regain shareholder and
customer trust and remained CEO until 2009.
Swainson was credited with stabilizing the company,
but the firm did not successfully grow revenue. This
growth issue remains today and is partly due to the
fact that over 50% of CAs revenue comes from the
mainframe market which is slowly declining. None of
CAs distributed ITOM offerings led the market,
although industry analysts recognize CA for having the
strongest portfolio of network management products
in the industry.

E | Notable Software Acquisitions

2010: CA acquired Nimsoft for $350Mperformance

and service level managementextends to the cloud
2010: CA acquired 3-TeraAppLogic cloud platform
2011: CA acquired ITKO for $330Mservice simulation
solutions for developing applications in composite and
cloud environments
2013: CA acquired Nolio to strengthen its position in
the DevOps market
On 22 April 2013, acquired Layer 7 Technologies, a
privately held provider of application services
governance. The acquisition of Layer 7 enables CA to
provide leading security and management technology
to the API marketplace

F | How CA positions and sells cloud

management
The way CA positions cloud management mirrors its overall
management software business. CA groups different cloud
management functionality into different, and often
overlapping, products areas including:

I.

Model Cloud Services

Build a model of a cloud service prior to writing code.

Simulate a service and determine performance, capacity
requirements and cost structure. Products include: Cloud
Compass, Business Service Insight, Capacity Manager, LISA
Service Virtualization

II.

Assemble Could Services

Turn-key cloud computing platform enables customers to

define and compose a complete service definition in a
visual model, then transform their application to become
an on-demand business service. Products include:
AppLogic, Business Service Insight, and Capacity Manager

III.

Assure Cloud Services

Link applications and transactions with the underlying

infrastructure, residing either on- or off-premise, to deliver
real-time visibility into how critical cloud services are
performing. Products include: Service Desk Manager,
Nimsoft Service Desk, and Application Performance
Management

IV.

Automate Cloud Services

Automation across virtual and physical infrastructure,

applications and services Solutions include predictive
analytics that recommend workload placement and ensure
that when a service is provisioned into the environment
that it will run effectively and efficiently and be sized
appropriately to meet the needs of the requestor. A selfservice catalog enables a customers users to and securely
provision and de-provision resources and services, meter
service consumption, and allocate costs appropriately.
Products include: AppLogic, Cloud Automation Suite,
Service Catalog, Virtual Placement Manager

CA, realizing cloud computings growth potential, acquired

a string of cloud computing firms. As an example, CA
acquired six firms in 14 months over 2009 and 2010 for an
V.
Cloud
estimated total cost of $1B.
2014 Microsoft Corporation | Confidential | For Microsoft Internal Use Only

Security

Protect access to applications no matter where they reside.

Enable advanced authentication and federated single signon to cloud and Web applications, VPNs, and Web access
management systems. Products include: CloudMinder,
eCom Minder (Authentication), SiteMinder Secure SSO and
Access Management, SiteMinder Federation

VI.

Many of the products listed above are from CAs legacy

distributed management portfolio. Needless to say, no
vendor has done a more thorough job of cloud-washing
their product set. Many of the legacy products were overly
complex and required huge efforts to set up and maintain
in a traditional enterprise data center. These same
products will be as much, if not more, complex when they
extend to cloud management. There is often little
integration between products.
CAs traditional customer is the very large enterprise or
large service provider. These types of customers are ideally
suited to CAs products which typically scale very well, but
are also very complex.
Prior to 2011, CA was hardly known as a channel-friendly
vendor, given its aggressive direct-sales business model
and focus on selling to large companies. Channel efforts
were focused on a limited number of products, including
CAs ARCserve backup and recovery software and ERwin
data modeling software.
In 2011 the company began putting more focus on the
channel to reach smaller companies. CA now focuses its
direct sales efforts on large ($2B+) enterprise customers.
Customers with sales between $300 million and $2 billion,
which CA calls growth companies, are being turned over
to channel partners. Never-the- less, direct sales still make
up the majority of company revenue.

G | CA Sales Tactics

CA solely targets the IT Buying Centers, especially IT

OperationsCA does not work with Line-of-Business
(LOB) managers and often interfaces at a fairly low
level in the IT organization
o
LOB managers are getting more involved in IT
purchasing; especially related to the cloud

CAs revenue is very concentrated in their top 1000

corporate accounts
o
These are often mainframe customers as well
o
The financial services vertical market
represents nearly 40% of CAs revenue due to
high mainframe use
CA Technologies has been shuffling their sales team
and sales targets for over a year
CA Field Reps. will likely claim that CA is ranked #1 in
cloud managementThis is from a 2012 IDC report:
IDC, Worldwide Cloud Systems Management Software
2011 Vendor Shares: Market Moves Beyond SelfService, Doc #236556 August 2012

I N STALLE D BA S E

Traditional focus on large

Introduce heavily discoun
Discuss integration with
products
Use portfolio pricing
Upsell products

CO M PETE
UATI ON

Leverage portfolio pricin

Start with an open mes
Push broad portfolio and
Will push their focus on h
Leverage executive relati

Turn-Key Cloud

Compose and deploy complex applications on demand.

Using a catalog of virtual appliances, users configure the
applications and infrastructure once, and then treat them
as a single unit or virtual business service. The entire
service is scaled automatically and can be quickly
replicated or migrated to another data center if needed.
Products include: AppLogic

CA may also go-to-market with Citrix: See Citrix

Alliance

SI T

CU STO M E R LOC K- I N

Customized programmin
Aggressively discount SW

How we win against CA

Sell high in the organization and engage with the LOB

managers if appropriate
Understand CAs motivation and sales tacticsTake
advantage of any CA sales force disruption
Point out the complexity of CAs solutionsPush
Microsofts superior time to value
Sell Microsofts leading virtualization platform and the
deep integration with Microsofts cloud management
platform including the broad set of management
capabilities

A | Position CA as a legacy physical

infrastructure management vendor

Remind
customer of
the inherent

complexity in CAs management tools

Reference CAs many cloud acquisitions and lack of
integration

2014 Microsoft Corporation | Confidential | For Microsoft Internal Use Only

Mention that AppLogic customers are unhappy with

CAs tardiness in turning around support for new
hardware and devices
Highlight CAs confusing cloud strategydual cloud
management platforms
Does CAs offering match the customer? CA typically
positions AppLogic to Service Providersare they
trying to sell to an enterprise customer?
With the confusion around two CA cloud
offerings, ASC is just beginning to see some
customer uptake. It is too soon to know whether
it will succeed in this crowded Cloud
Management Platform (CMP) marketplace. Gartner, March 2013 ID:G00245647

B | Understand CA Automation Suite

for clouds
Origin of CA Datacenter Automation: With roots from
both legacy acquisitions and organic integration
development, CAs automation solutions were
originally designed for physical environments that
were based on Cohesion (App discovery and
configuration) and ITPAM (IT Process Automation
Manager) and an organically developed bare-metal
provisioning platform. CA embarked on its strategy for
datacenter automation (bare metal provisioning) to
compete with the likes of HP (OpsWare) and BMC
(BladeLogic). CA developed a self-service provisioning
engine for their own needs (named Labs on Demand)
in which they ultimately productized into cloud
automation.
CA expanded to private cloud by cobbling together CA
Service Catalog, CA Service Accounting (which both
come from their Service Desk/ITSM line) and also
technologies
from
infrastructure
management
(eHealth/Spectrum) to include integrations to vCenter
API and Amazon EC2. This represents the bulk of their
current CA Automation Suite for Clouds product.
Auxiliary products for capacity management and
placement (Hyperformix acquisition) are often
positioned with their suite of offerings.
In an alternative SKU, CA couples the above
components with AppLogic (acquired from 3Tera),
which includes a visual catalog object designer
focused on application platform and database platform
provisioning and a performance-monitoring engine.
ASC also includes an ECC to AWS. CA can further
integrate ASC with other products such as Capacity
Management
(developed
from the
acquired
Hyperformix technology) and Spectrum e-Health as a
foundation
for service
assurance or
Network
Automation to simplify end-to-end infrastructure
provisioning.
Overall, CA Technologies has the potential to assemble
a comprehensive CMP solution by improving and
expanding the integration between its products. The
company already made some progress on this front
(for example, by exposing AppLogic catalog objects
into the ASC self-service provisioning portal).
At the same time, however, CA faces many challenges,
such as speeding up the execution of its vision to
match competitors and changing the market
perception that CA's technologies, like the ones of its
competitors, are legacy and unable to address the
modern challenges of cloud computing

C | CA Technologies: IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS

Traditional IT vendors, such as CA Technologies, often
struggle with the challenge of transforming their
existing portfolios into a suite of cloud products. CA
Technologies Automation Suite for Clouds convincingly
ties together CAs core strengths server, network,
and storage automation, service management, and
capacity planning into a flexible and extensible
private cloud platform. Resources can be provisioned
via CA Server Automation, CA AppLogic (CAs cloud
platform), or public clouds, such as Amazon EC2. Large
CA customers confirmed CAs status as a Value Leader,
as the solution offers the flexibility and extensibility
required for even the largest and most complex cloud
deployments.

D | CA Technologies: Cloud
Architecture
CA Automation Suite for Clouds offers the software
tools necessary to deploy entire business services via
CA Server Automation, CA AppLogic, and multiple
public clouds (Amazon EC2, Windows Azure). CA
AppLogic constitutes CA Technologies cloud platform,
which is able
to rapidly create, deploy, and decommission complex
business services.
Unlike all other cloud solutions in this field, CA
AppLogic entirely abstracts application environments
from the underlying hardware, making these
applications fully portable and disposable. Due to this
ability to flexibly provision business services to
standard servers (CA Server Automation), the
AppLogic Cloud Grid, or the public cloud, CA
Technologies has received the Most Innovative
Architecture award.
Flexibility and overall breadth of functionality were
the key reasons mentioned by customers for selecting
the CA Technologies cloud platform. EMA applauds CA
Technologies for focusing on its core strengths, when
offering cloud solutions. The CA Technologies cloud
basically creates a wrapper around CA Technologies
existing portfolio, enabling customers to leverage their
previous investments. Within this context, CA
Technologies offers two core cloud products:

E | AppLogic
Acquired by CA in 2011, 3Tera AppLogic is a turnkey
cloud- computing platform currently target towards
service providers, but often marketed with CA
Automation Suite for Clouds (leading audience to
believe
they
are
integratedsee
reference
architecture slide above).
CA AppLogic offers a turnkey, unified applicationcentric development and deployment environment for
cloud-ready SaaS applications. CA AppLogic allows
developers to package an entire distributed
application as a single entity that can be started,
stopped, replicated, moved, and managed as a whole.
The solution is designed to support scalable, secure,
highly available service levels by detecting changes in
the cloud hardware infrastructure, or demands for
additional resources, and responding to them
automatically. [Source: IDC] AppLogic also has a very
intuitive drag and drop application deployment
interface.

2014 Microsoft Corporation | Confidential | For Microsoft Internal Use Only

CAs repositioning of AppLogic for the service provider

customer base takes advantage of AppLogics unique
capabilities including a fabric-based infrastructure in
software, which enables service providers to
implement offerings on top of a complete commodity
infrastructure, potentially improving service provider
margins. For example, AppLogic requires no SAN, Fibre
channel device, RAID controllers or any type of NAS.
AppLogic also uniquely delivers a visual service
designer for complex application service creation,
reducing the amount of code that needs to be written
to deliver new services.

II.

Grid OS: The CA AppLogic grid operating system is

exciting and maybe ahead of its time. However, EMA
believes that AppLogic will be increasingly successful
in the future.

Excellent automation and orchestration: CAs

automation and orchestration platform does an
excellent job at integrating heterogeneous
technologies. CAs service cartridges eliminate
complexity for a number of standard tasks, such as the
provisioning of Amazon EC2 resources and virtual
desktop automation.

Mainframe support: CA ASC supports IBMs

POWER Architecture, as well as most popular
mainframe operating systems.

Service-centric strategy: CA has realigned its

product portfolio to focus on optimally supporting the
business service. While certain products will require
some work to truly achieve this goal, there has
definitely been significant progress.

Comprehensive solutions portfolio: Clients noted

that while CA ASC is complex, its range of
functionality and integration capabilities is what sets
the CA solution apart from the competition.

Hardware independence: CA offers strong support

for NetApp Flexpod and VCE vBlock.

F | CA Automation Suite for Clouds (CA ASC)

It comes in three flavors

III.

An additional cartridge for out of the box service

provisioning to VMware vCloud Director is announced
for release in 2013. For organizations seeking to add
cloud capabilities self-service provisioning,
chargeback, advanced orchestration, application
patterns, etc. to their existing datacenter
environment (brownfield deployment), CA ASC could
be an excellent choice

I.

Strength and Limitations

CA Technologies has tied together its existing product
portfolio and turned it into a rock-solid cloud platform.
CA AppLogic, the companys innovative grid operating
system, is gaining traction with service providers and
managed services companies. EMA believes that CA
Technologies will be successful, if the company
continues to focus on delivering XaaS (everything as a
service), as proclaimed in its current roadmap.With
2012 revenue of $4.7 billion, an operating margin of
30%, and $1.61 billion in operating cash flow, CA
Technologies can be described as financially stable
and in a good position to complete its transformation
from a traditional systems management vendor into a
service-centric provider of cloud technologies. At the
same time, CA Technologies owns a vast install base
of its mainframe solutions, providing the company with
a steady stream of income to continuously fuel this
transition.

Strengths

Limitations

Complexity of the overall solution: While CA has

worked hard on integrating the various cloud products,
there is still more integration work to do. Currently
there are too many user interfaces and, for example,
the integration between CA ASC and Virtual Placement
Manager could be tighter.

Professional services requirements: The

deployment and configuration of CA ASC is not simple,
and requires a significant amount of professional
services. In order to address this concern, CA
Technologies offers a free pre-sales cloud workshop,
the purpose of which is to better determined the scope
and character of the required professional services.

G | Ongoing issues with CAs cloud

strategy as compared to System
Center Suite
I.

Complexity

With a complex architecture including multiple product

installations (this may have improved a little with a
common installer), multiple back-end databases, hefty
infrastructure requirements, multiple frameworks and
middleware (e.g. multiple versions of Apache)CA
solutions prove to be difficult to implement, difficult to
manage. CA cloud solutions require a physical base
installation while not leveraging virtual appliances, or
virtual App technology.

II.

Cost

CA has a tradition of complex licensing and steep pricing

models. This is evident in CAs tradition of costly
implementations challenge any CA competitive opportunity
by asking the customer for details of the CA statement of
work (SOW) Not Policy Driven: Additional steps and

2014 Microsoft Corporation | Confidential | For Microsoft Internal Use Only

overhead is required in approvals of self-service

provisioning requests. Also, the work flow orchestration
needs to be custom configured to provide even a base
policy foundation.

III.

Built for physical

CA solution are simply not built for cloud environments,

with Microsoft integration as an afterthought (and no real
performance monitoring/ management solution). Their
products are not designed to quickly adapt to highly
dynamic, virtualized, cloud environment,but rather to the
specifications of a static, /siloed physical infrastructure.
Constrains the Microsoft Platform: With limited integration
to the System Center Suite CA has no control, or visibility
to leverage (and in some cases restricts) many of the
Microsoft cloud- specific infrastructure capabilities, such as
HA, data replication, infrastructure virtualization and faulttolerant infrastructure.
Evidence of CA retrofitting their legacy built solutions while
cloud washing them to appear to be built for cloud is
clear throughout their entire CA Automation Suite for
Clouds.
CA Technologies large portfolio of Cloud Solutions
can be difficult to navigate and differentiate.
Info-Tech Research Group

H | Why customers chose Microsoft

over CA

Microsoft has far more compatible cloud partners to

eliminate lock-in and allow customers to move easily
from one off-premise provider to another
Microsoft has a better focus on the data center and a
better vision for cloud computing
System Center Suite is very easy use and implement
System Center Suites is easy to integrate with other
vendors productsIt is open
CAs cloud management platform solutions are largely
unproven while Microsoft has the most mature product
deployments of any vendor in the industry and has
been recognized as industry leading for the
management of both private and hybrid clouds

I | Selecting your best sales strategy

I.

Compete

Understanding the scenarios

Description
Customer has little CA software installed or it is
mainframe software only or is unhappy with the
existing portfolio of CA management software.
Greenfield cloud opportunity
What to Expect
CA will likely mention their broad and deep cloud
management portfolio
They will tout their long history and expertise in the IT
operations management software market
Compete with a full System Center Suite stack,
specifically focusing on the Hybrid Datacenter, and the
strength of Microsoft vision.

II.

Embrace

Understanding the scenarios

Description
Customer has installed some CA ITOM tools
Does the customer see this as a natural extension of
their existing CA tools?
What to Expect
The key battle to focus on will be between CA
Automation Suite for Clouds or AppLogic and System
Center Suite
CA will target their large corporate accounts including
main frame and financial services
Embrace the CA tools and show how System Center
Suite / Hyper-v can co-exist (i.e. System Center Suite
integrates well with CA pieces).

III.

Surround

Understanding the scenarios

Description
Customer has made the decision to build out the CA
Automation Suite for Clouds or AppLogic platform
2014 Microsoft Corporation | Confidential | For Microsoft Internal Use Only

What to Expect
These customers may still struggle to make their CA
solutions work effectively.
It is important to stay engaged and try to sell adjacent
solutions like System Center Operations Manager.
There also remain opportunities to sell App Controller
or Service Manager into the stacks. (CA markets the
integration with Service Manager.)
Ongoing engagement should also be used to protect
the footprint of Hyper-v as CA supports multiple
hypervisors including KVM and Hyper-v.

J | Handling Objections
Q. We already have CA ITOM software to manage our
physical infrastructure.
A. CA has some long established tools in ITOM. However,
Microsoft is far better aligned and strategically positioned
to deliver the requirements of a comprehensive cloud
management platform (CMP) with our Unified management
for the Cloud OS strategy and vision. Since our focus is on
the cloud stack, we are best positioned to both leverage
your existing CA & Microsoft investments by taking your
business to the next level of IT agility, efficiency and cost
savings in the cloud.
Q. Is Microsoft really a management company?
A. Yes, and one closely tied with the leading platform for
cloud computing. Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 helps
you realize the benefits of the Microsoft Cloud OS by
delivering unified management across your datacenters,
service provider datacenters, and Windows Azure. With
System Center 2012 R2, you can:
Utilize enterprise-grade management capabilities with
best-in-class performance for your Windows Server
environments and first-party Microsoft workloads (SQL,
Exchange, and SharePoint).
Reduce datacenter complexity by simplifying how you
provision, manage, and operate your infrastructure.
Enable delivery of predictable application SLAs
through a relentless focus on optimizing your
applications and workloads.
Q. [Capacity] Why would you trust your hypervisor vendor
to tell you how much hypervisor you need?
A. Microsoft leverages its own domain expertise and tight
platform integration to provide accurate capacity
management and optimization to get the most out of your
cloud and overall Microsoft investment.

structure and management to fully support heterogeneous

and hybrid cloud environment.

K | Microsoft Differentiators
With the addition of new and powerful virtualization
features in Microsoft Hyper-V in Windows Server 8 and
Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012,
Microsoft can provide a rich user experience and efficient
management technologies for meeting a wide range of
customer needs. Microsoft regards virtualization as an
enabling technology that facilitates greater flexibility and
efficiency in the data center.

I.

Enterprise customers such as HSBC, Target, and

Ingersoll Rand deploy Hyper-V in production. Since
2008, Hyper-V has gone through three releases (R1,
R2, and SP1) to enhance performance and scalability
and add new features such as Dynamic Memory.
Hyper-V R2 SP1 provides a scalable, reliable, and
highly available virtualization platform.

II.

Built-in Virtualization and

Familiar Platform
Hyper-V is a key feature of Microsoft Windows Server
2008 with built in security and reliability capabilities,
providing an environment that is familiar to Windows
administrators

III.

Superior Management
System Center Virtual Machine Manager can manage
physical, virtual, and cloud environments, as well as
heterogeneous hypervisor environments (Hyper-V,
ESXi, Xen). System Center Operations Manager also
can provide full visibility into applications.

IV.

Hyper-V & System Center

Optimized for Microsoft
Workloads
Microsoft lab results demonstrate exceptional
performance for Microsoft applications on Microsoft
private cloud: 450,000 concurrent Microsoft
SharePoint users on one physical server with five
VMs; 80,000 OLTP users on one server with four VMs;
and 20,000 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes on one
server with five VMs. These highly scalable and high
performance results show that Hyper-V can be used to
virtualize Tier-1 data center applications with
confidence. The report is located here,
http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/en/us/solutio
n-business-apps.aspx

Q. [Cloud] Microsoft is an element Hyper-v cloud manager

not designed for the business, how can I trust that
Microsoft is aligned to my business needs in IT?
A. With ongoing focus and investment in management as
well as the introduction of the System Center suite,
Microsoft has demonstrated its continued commitment and
success in delivering business value with Cloud computing
from all aspects of delivering business value.
Q. CA provides broad heterogeneous support and is
vendor agnostic. I am concerned about vendor Lock-in.
A. Heterogeneity is a term used loosely by many ITOM
vendors (including CA). The fact is that CA has many
aspects of their own product suites that promote vendor
lock-in and CAs CLM solution represents a huge vendor
lock-in. Microsoft leverages existing investments in infra-

Enterprise Ready

V.

Physical and virtual

Microsofts System Center provides a robust physical
and virtualized server management solution. This
powerful solution provides greater breadth for
customer infrastructures, and enables support for
existing and future server platforms.

2014 Microsoft Corporation | Confidential | For Microsoft Internal Use Only

VI.

Extensibility
Microsoft provides the most extensible solution for
partners and customers, enabling the ability to
monitor, provision and self-heal any application or
integrate with existing management tools. This
ensures that extensions to meet a customers specific
needs can quickly be completed without code
changes. This is not possible today with BladeLogics
solution and requires the vendor to create support for
new infrastructure components.

VII.

Integration
BMC has been unsuccessful integrating its acquired
datacenter automation technologies (Marimba, Run
Book Automation) into its core sales strategy. BMC
needs multiple products and acquisitions to
accomplish the same capabilities as System Center.
Point out the importance of a tightly integrated
solution. With System Center, customers get a
seamless user experience through integrated user
interfaces and a common look and feel. If customers
encounter an installed base with Marimba or other
BMC acquisitions, try to displace.

VIII.

Ease of use
Compared with any of the major system management
vendors, Microsoft offers the easiest solution to install,
begin monitoring/provisioning, and provide value to
the business. Other vendor solutions require
significant tweaking just to get them to discover

devices. This ease of use remains a key differentiator

in the market as highlighted in each survey done to
date. Stress that CA has multiple consoles and GUIs
because of acquisitions from the past. For example,
one would have to work with well over 20 CA consoles
to accomplish change, configuration, performance and
availability management tasks while Microsoft can
accomplish that with two consoles Ops Mgr and
SCCM.

4 | Resources
Refer to additional System Center 2012 R2 resources
System Center 2012 R2 on TechNet
Download and evaluate System Center 2012 R2
System Center marketplace
Check out our blogs
System Center 2012 R2
Read the System Center 2012 R2 Datasheet
Read the System Center 2012 R2 White Paper
See how System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager
and Windows Intune helps manage users and their devices
Benefits and capabilities
System Center solutions
Virtual Labs: System Center 2012 R2
System Center 2012 R2 Cloud & Datacenter Management
System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager
System Center 2012 R2 Endpoint Protection

2014 Microsoft Corporation | Confidential | For Microsoft Internal Use Only