The Importance of Staying Current on Your Upgrades

We are living in an app economy, where every business is a software business. While this is exciting, it also presents an array of unprecedented challenges. The need to maintain product version currency via solid upgrade strategies has never been greater. With technology being a major factor in the success or failure of business, it is critical that you carefully and strategically consider remaining current on your CA Technologies software products.

Reducing Cost and Improving ROI

In the end, delaying an upgrade may prove much costlier than a well-planned and timely upgrade program. Your software investment includes not only the technical capabilities available when you purchased the product but all the research and development that follows. Timely upgrades of CA products can improve your ROI both quantitatively and qualitatively. As a practical matter, older software versions used in production can become a cost burden for an IT department as staff try to keep up with hardware, software and applications. An older version can require more attention, more time to support and more workarounds as technology is deployed, upgraded and integrated.

Protect Your Enterprise and Maintain Business Continuity

Upgrading your CA software helps ensure business continuity is maintained and that there are no unnecessary failures. An older version may lack important security updates, new features and integration with current technology trends and advancements, which in turn can lead to a competitive business advantage. Continuing to use unsupported software may pose a serious security risk for any enterprise. Being on the latest software version protects you by allowing you to implement fixes and avoid issues. A current release can help protect your systems and applications from viruses, spyware and/or other malicious software that can harm or steal data, or force lengthy delays in problem resolution.

Focus on Newer Technologies

By ensuring that you are always running the current release of a product, you can focus on introducing newer technologies, such as Internet of Things (IoT), big data and analytics, automation and machine learning and a “digital everything” mobile business approach to your enterprise with greater confidence. The cumulative advantage of periodic software upgrades is that you won’t miss out on those all too important integration points, new functionality and fixes that could make running IT enterprise a much more seamless experience and a business advantage.

New Releases Include New Features and Functionality That Increase Your Efficiency

At CA, we are continuously developing new products and enhancing existing products with new features and functionality suggested by customers like you. These new features and improvements increase productivity, improve ease-of use and ensure that you are maximizing your technology investment.

Upgrading your software is a best practice that will help reduce your internal support burden and maintain your business continuity. We are committed to improving your software upgrade experience through “installer” enhancements and product changes. We use agile and SAFe methods to accelerate the delivery of business value to our customers through a process of continuous planning, development,

We use agile and SAFe methods to accelerate the delivery of business value to our customers through a process of continuous planning, development, delivery and feedback. Because of this iterative planning and feedback through our ideation processes, our development teams can continuously align the delivered software with common customer business needs. You, the customer, get more innovative versions of solutions delivered to you more frequently, allowing you to better keep up with changes in your enterprise.

Should your organization be running software that reaches end of service, your enterprise and business continuity could be at risk, and you would only be entitled to self-service support mechanisms, provided you maintain an active CA Maintenance license. With an active Maintenance license, you can continue to access extensive self-service support resources, including knowledge-based articles, published solutions and upgrades. If needed, you can purchase the CA Extended Support program, which lets you continue to receive assisted support. Our recommendation is always to implement the latest version of software to help mitigate risks to your enterprise and take full advantage of the latest technology trends, features and integrations.

New Releases May Include Architectural and Operational Enhancements

We continually evaluate customer requirements in combination with technology improvements. This can lead to product architectural changes that reduce the install overhead to provide more seamless integrations and ensure that any customer investment is future-proofed and compatible with the latest releases of operating systems, browsers, client applications and third-party solutions. For example, we leverage the latest container technology to shield customers from the complexity of install and configuration.

By upgrading to newer releases of products, customers can benefit from reduced total cost of ownership (TCO). We understand that TCO may be difficult to define when it comes to the lifecycle of software, but consider this: Many improvements to products increase compliance and security, and provide greater transparency with real-time dashboards and proactive alerting, API integration and reports. Architectural enhancements are made to drive higher administrative and support productivity, and to lower costs via easy-to-use, intuitive UIs, additional features and faster upgrades. 

Internally, CA development teams have fully adopted agile methods to ensure that new versions are released with regular cadence and operational improvements. Maintaining version currency allows you to stay current with your enterprise technology stack and makes it easier to integrate to and communicate with other software vendors and applications. You get the benefit of receiving rapid product innovations.

Plan Your Upgrade

While every customer environment is unique, we continue to simplify the experience and believe everyone should start with an upgrade strategy. Some upgrades are easily handled in-house with the right resources, while others require external support. As you complete your assessment and build your strategy, consider your options for assistance and map out your needs and timing. Upgrades can be derailed by surprises borne of miscommunication or fractured teamwork. Your plan should include concrete steps for:

• Evaluating readiness
• Deploying the new architecture
• Transitioning integrations
• Deploying the production environment
• Performing the data migration
• Driving solution adoption

Enlist the Experts

We can help with your upgrade plan and provide resources, options and expertise to help ensure you get the most from your software investment. That’s why CA services and support teams have joined forces to give you more options, from a full-service engagement to self-service tools to help you succeed in-house. When you work with our team to scope your upgrade project, we’ll help you craft a strategy that makes sense for your environment, team, timeline and budget—and you choose whether to execute that strategy internally or hand off the heavy lifting to CA. No matter what your level of services engagement, CA Support is accessible 24/7. That means that for every upgrade, for every product, you have access to CA Support’s resources from upgrade start to finish, plus an extra 30 days to close out all remaining support issues.

Our deep research library and extensive self-service tools are always online and ready to help. Whether you need to speak with a person now or find the latest documentation and downloads, we’ve got you covered. For more information, visit our support site: https://support.ca.com.

Use Upgrade Services

We understand that any upgrade has the potential to strain an organization’s resources and ability to deploy technology updates. Our upgrade services can help your organization transition more quickly to current product releases and foster greater solution adoption with less effort and risk. By following a structured approach, CA Services helps companies achieve the greatest impact when updating their software. CA Services experts assess the current implementation architecture and design and the impact it has on your business, as well as evaluate the functionality of the system and your business drivers. They provide recommendations for improvements to the environment before performing the upgrade and confirm that the solution is running as expected post-upgrade. This way, you can realize greater value from the solution’s new features and functionality, reduce maintenance costs and improve adoption of your software solution.

Join CA Communities

Consider joining an online CA Community for your product. You’ll hear directly from other customers who have benefitted from upgrading their software, and you’ll have access to upgrade resources from CA experts about how to successfully plan and execute an upgrade. You’ll also have exclusive access to product roadmaps, where you’ll receive regular information on upcoming features and functionality. For more information, visit www.ca.com/roadmaps. CA Communities is where members go every day to collaborate on the installation and use of CA software solutions. It’s where the community helps one another solve problems and share information. By joining CA Communities, you can help improve products and processes, and invent new ways to get things done. For more information, visit https://communities.ca.com.

In Conclusion

We know that maintaining a modern software factory IT environment is critical as business and user requirements rise to a point where IT is expected to deliver 24/7/365. Unexpected outages and downtime can have a direct impact on revenue and customer satisfaction. Maintaining a regular refresh cycle of your installed software is critical to meet the needs of the business and business continuity. Our commitment is to help you plan successful upgrades with lower risk, minimal cost and less time, leading to better use of your investment with CA.