Walldorf, Germany-based software vendor SAP has struck
a deal with CA’s Wily division that will help improve support for its
NetWeaver platform.
This is, finally,
also some good news for CA , which has sorely been in need of
some.
It also provides a glimmer of hope that the acquisition spree launched by new CEO John Swainson is finally bearing fruit.
According to the terms of the deal, customers of SAP’s NetWeaver ERP
the same monitoring solution used by SAP’s own NetWeaver support
organization, Active Global Support (AGS).
Introscope delivers real-time visibility into production environments,
enabling IT staff to detect, diagnose and resolve problems before they have
time to impact the business.
Paul Melmon, vice president of business and corporate development at Wily,
explained that the AGS has already been using Introscope to do remote
root-cause analysis and diagnostics for NetWeaver installations.
Now that enterprise IT staff can see the same dashboards as the AGS
engineers, they can speak a common language during a support call.
“They can have a common view of how the system is performing,” Melmon told
internetnews.com.
“This is significantly reducing mean time to repair, and it makes the
customer more self-sufficient over time.”
Melmon added that this arrangement will also help SAP reduce the cost of
customer support.
That will become increasingly critical for the enterprise software giant, as
more customers migrate from their legacy R3 systems to NetWeaver.
At the same time, the deal means that SAP customers can contact Wily
directly if they’re interested in licensing additional Introscope
functionalities, which means new sales opportunities for CA.
“SAP is opening their relationship with customers to CA,” Melmon said. “This is a very good thing for both companies, which is pretty rare these
days.”
Indeed, when CA announced its acquisition of Wily in January, at least one analyst noted that Wily’s
relationships with several enterprise software vendors, including SAP, left
something to be desired.
Melmon maintained that Wily was already working well with SAP, but agreed
that being acquired by CA “has been an accelerator.”
He also said that Wily is having “active discussions about how we can work
together more effectively” with Microsoft and Oracle.
All of which should have Swainson smiling.
