I am writing this from CA World 2013 in Las Vegas where the atmosphere is charged up.  The theme for this conference is "Go Big. IT with Impact".  The idea is that IT departments have to think big to make material business impacts and succeed.  At the end of the day IT needs to solve business problems. Companies need the right strategy and technology solutions to harness the Cloud, Internet of Everything, mobile and Big Data. In a "partner with impact" session exclusively for partners, David Bradley, SVP Channel Sales, CA Technologies featured Rick Snyder, VP Global Partner Organization, Cisco.  The complete video is below

In this video, Rick mentions Cisco Validated designs (CVD), which are reference architectures, and blue prints for success. These designs incorporate a wide range of technologies and products into a portfolio of solutions developed to address the business needs of our customers.  These CVDs document solutions that are tested to facilitate and improve customer deployments.

CA Technologies stressed the importance of the SaaS delivery model and the benefits of providing application services.  CA also thinks that the opportunity for enterprise class application services offered as managed services will grow rapidly.  Service providers should be beneficiaries of this shift. A common customer of Cisco and CA Technologies -Logicalis, won the partner impact award for their managed private cloud solution for a UK bank.

There were several interesting announcements in the past 24 hours. The following caught my attention.

1. CA in association with SAP will provide Mobile device Management solutions for enterprises. IT Management and Security are very high on the agenda for most enterprises. As more enterprise applications run on mobile devices securing and managing these devices becomes critical.
2. CA also announced devops automation capability with the Nolio products.  With application aware system monitoring and management enterprises can expedite application development and reduce costs.
3. CA Technologies announced the acquisition of Layer 7 technologies, a leader in the API management space.  APIs have become a necessity for application developers. REST-based APIs have allowed application developers to build rich web and mobile apps by providing the ability to integrate multiple services into individual application.

These approaches complement the way in which we help our own customers. The ISR-AXs are application aware and improve user experience at remote branch offices. The Cisco UCS has an API and facilitates infrastructure programmability.  This enables integration, orchestration and execution of automated workflows. We will have two breakout sessions tomorrow at the conference:

TD055SN- Cisco UCS and CA: Operational efficiency with Converged Infrastructure (Speaker : Mark Balch, Director of Product Management, Data Center Business Unit)

TB056SN- Delivering Optimal Application Experience with Cisco ISR-AX (Speaker: Liad Ofek, Manager, Technical Marketing at the Service Routing Group)

I am eagerly looking forward to the keynote this evening by Richard Branson, Founder of Virgin Group.