Name the vendor or solution and a marketing slick is sure to tell you somewhere that it increases efficiency, decreases the overall total cost of ownership and improves productivity. Sure, we’ve all heard these features and benefits before. But are they just fluffy words marketers use to capture your attention, or are they actually indicative of real-world results?
At CA Technologies, we asked that same question within our Global Information Services (GIS) department, and initiated the CA Technologies on CA program to explore the answer. We believe that if we’re telling our customers that CA’s solutions have tremendous business value, then we need to substantiate those claims with authentic proof points. And there’s no better guinea pig than us! We've set out on a mission to implement CA’s own products within our IT enterprise, because it allows us to expose the value of running, integrating and managing our business with them. The benefits are three-fold:
- Showcase the product features that were proven to be effective in delivering on promises, such as increased availability and improved agility.
- Share lessons learned with our customers to help them avoid pitfalls or discover how they can enhance their implementation.
- Leverage our status as customer zero and work with CA Product Development to improve functionality, address early deployment issues and help the overall customer experience.
And just like our customers, CA has specific requirements that may prevent the deployment of certain solutions at different time-frames. Before embarking on any implementation, we must first analyze the IT landscape, available resources, implementation calendars, existing processes, etc. and determine if a product will negatively or positively affect business applications, such as customer support or revenue booking. While we may not be able to deploy all CA products right out of the gate, simply taking the time for this analysis allows us to better understand the implementation challenges our customers face.
In CA Communities, it is our collective goal to go community by community, product by product and implement the solutions that make the most sense to our organization at the right time. We’ll share our results and observations with you, our community members, through webcasts, message boards and more! With each step we take, we’ll prove that CA Technologies truly does walk the talk.
Meghan Stabler is an Advisor at CA Technologies where she focuses on bringing ingenious marketing and communications programs to IT, solutions and customers. With her brain processing faster than most microchips, she’s consistently churning on how to go from vision to execution.