Clarity

To:             CA PPM Customers

From:        The CA Technologies CA PPM Product Team

Subject:    End of Life Announcement for CA Business Intelligence for CA PPM (formerly known as CA Clarity™ PPM)

CA Technologies works continually to improve its software and service offerings to meet the needs of customers. Over the last couple of years, the trend in the business intelligence marketplace has been to shift away from a focus on specialized report writers to empowering business-driven information consumers who want to perform their own data discovery and self-service analysis.  This trend has been validated by many CA PPM customers who no longer want reporting to be a specialized silo with extended report development queues.  As your innovation partner, we have conducted extensive research on new reporting platforms to meet the needs of our customers and to better align with our CA PPM roadmap.  Based on that research, we have selected Jaspersoft as the new business intelligence platform for CA PPM.  Jaspersoft provides customers with a significantly more powerful yet simpler reporting experience.

As a result of this new direction, we have carefully analyzed the steps necessary to transition from a traditional reporting platform to a new business intelligence platform.  Our experience in migrating our own reporting content encourages us that the transition will be relatively easy for many of our customers, but some customers may desire more time.  With available extended support options, customers will have 2+ years to transition from CA Business Intelligence (and its underlying SAP Business Objects XI component) to Jaspersoft.  The key timelines for the End of Life for CA Business Intelligence are listed below:

·         Support of the existing CA Business Intelligence platform will continue through the End of Life date of December 31, 2015.  At that time the product will no longer be supported unless the Customer requires CA Extended Support.

·         CA Extended Support, one of the CA Technologies support offerings, is designed to extend support for our software product versions or releases that have reached their End of Life date.  On request, CA Extended Support for priority 1 issues will be available for a defined period not to exceed 12 months from the End of Life date December 31, 2016. For more information, visit our website, CA Support Online (https://support.ca.com/).

In accordance with our CA Support Policy and Terms (https://support.ca.com), consider this letter your written notification of this End of Life. This notice means that CA Business Intelligence for CA PPM will no longer be enhanced and that maintenance and technical support will be discontinued beginning December 31, 2015. However, we will honor any existing contractual requirements to sustain support on this product that may exist between you and CA Technologies.

The CA PPM Product Team is excited about launching and communicating this new innovative Jaspersoft reporting platform.  The transition process starts with the following information:

§  We created an FAQ document to answer basic questions and assist you with the transition to Jaspersoft.  The FAQ can be viewed on the CA Support site (Link to FAQ document).

§  More transition support information is on the way, such as new education and service offerings to ensure your transition goes smoothly and efficiently.

If you have questions regarding the support schedule, contact one of the following CA Technologies representatives or web locations:

§  CA Clarity Support at CA Support Online (https://support.ca.com/)

§  Your local CA Technologies account manager

§  A member of the Customer Success Team

§  CA Customer Care online at http://www.ca.com/us/customer-care.aspx where you can submit an online request using the Customer Care web form: https://communities.ca.com/web/guest/customercare

You can also call CA Customer Care at +1-800-225-5224 in North America or see http://www.ca.com/phone for the local number in your country.

Your success is important to us, and we look forward to continuing our successful partnership with you.

So now it is official.

The product life cycles to compare are at

CA Clarity Project & Portfolio Manager Release and Support Lifecycle Dates - CA Technologies

On the positive side, jaspersoft looks very powerful and potentially the right tool for CA PPM aka clarity .

Jumping the gun a bit, but how will this integrate into clarity? is it through jobs, or will it be something like a portlet?

I'd like to see continued use of actions or some sort of "reports" tab in objects.

on the negative side, many companies have spent a lot of time and money producing reports.

They've also invested in learning WEBI or Crystal.  With budgets stretched and resource low, I imagine some companies will never go to 16.x where support is lost.

It might even encourage them to look at other cloud based PPM tools (at task for instance)

Interested to know how the rest of the community feels

Support of the existing CA Business Intelligence platform will continue through the End of Life date of December 31, 2015.

Sounds like the BO support will end before the support of  some Clarity  versions that came with BO and no jaspersoft currently.

The other thing is that v14.2 is expected to come with jaspersoft, but jaspersoft is creating reports form the new Datawarehouse.

That sounds like a couple of gaps.

Having barely reached steady state on our move to OD and 13.2, I am not looking forward to another large effort.  We are among those am1 mentions that have invested much time, money and effort into Crystal and WEBI, and of because of the cloud requirements for Oracle (we were SQL server), just rewrote every single report.   Now we will have that drudgery to do all over again. Ugh