As the information technology infrastructure evolves, with differing levels of abstraction and complexity, monitoring and managing it also becomes more difficult. With a revolving carousel of options encompassing servers, storage, on-premises operations and public cloud, the overall network can easily get overlooked. One tech evangelist and executive at unified monitoring software company CA Technologies Inc. thinks that’s a really bad idea.

“We are in the business of network management. Network is the most neglected component in the infrastructure,” said Sudip Datta (pictured), vice president and head of products at CA Technologies.

Datta stopped by theCUBE’s Palo Alto Studio in California and spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, as part of the CA Technologies’ Cloud & Hybrid-IT Analytics for Digital Business event. They discussed making IT a proactive function, the company’s guiding principles for customers and the importance of data analytics. (* Disclosure below.)

Adding value to the enterprise

CA Technologies has developed a set of tools to manage applications, the infrastructure and network operations based on what it sees as a need to move IT out of being a reactive function to a proactive one. Using analytics and automation, network administration can become not only easier but can add value to the enterprise, Datta explained.

“That way, I can be the friend of business. It’s not acting after the fact, but acting proactively,” Datta said.

The company reinforces its technology message with a set of guiding principles it articulates to IT customers. These include paying close attention to discovery-based management, placing operations in a single pane of glass, overlaying that with contextual intelligence and analytics, and approaching problems in the spirit of collaboration, Datta stated.

“We try to innovate beyond what our customers have been asking for. Not only do we care about all of our customers, but the customers of our customers as well,” he said.

The smooth running of a network also depends increasingly on the ability to analyze data and apply machine learning to improve operations. CA Technologies is leveraging decades of data collection to offer value here as well.

“We have the true data, we are collecting the data and now we are building a data analytics platform where the data will be ingested and we will have insights,” Datta said. “That’s going to be a big differentiator.”

To watch the complete video interview, visit the event page (registration required). (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for CA Technologies’ Cloud & Hybrid-IT Analytics for Digital Business event. Neither CA Technologies Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE