CA extends CleverPath portal to new heights

Computer Associates (CA) will announce a number of enhancements to its CleverPath Portal product on Tuesday designed to push business intelligence delivery deeper into enterprises in a more tightly integrated and secure manner.

CleverPath Portal 4.5 will be launched around CA’s “Information in Action” initiative, a new blueprint ticketed by the software giant to move away from a point approach toward business process-oriented and application adaptable products built using common services architecture.

New features surrounding CleverPath 4.5 include the release of CleverPath Aion Business Rules Expert 9.5 to enable Web services access to business roles through the CleverPath infrastructure as well as beyond the firewall. 

In addition, the CleverPath product introduces a trio of new options, CleverPath Collaboration Option, CleverPath Advanced Access Control Option, and CleverPath Dashboard Option, to augment analysis and personalization without altering existing technology investments, said Ricardo Antuna, vice president of marketing, CleverPath Brand, at Islandia, N.Y.-based CA.

CleverPath Collaboration Option provides customers portlets to build integrated collaboration functions including instant messaging, application sharing, voice, chat, and video streaming integrated into a single portal. This allows users to have discussions based upon information or parts of content published within a portal.

Borrowing heavily from CA’s security eTrust Access Control product, CleverPath Advanced Access Option pools three key pieces of technology, security, directory, and SSO (single-sign-on) to simplify user authentication and authorization for bi-directional Web access.

Lastly, CleverPath Dashboard Collaboration gives customers the capability to quickly build and configure executive dashboards, KPIs, and other business metrics.

CSX Technology, a technology supplier for its parent company CSX Corporation and subsidiary freight transportation service subsidiaries, is evaluating CleverPath 4.5, said Lisa Balter, director of Commercial Applications for CSX Technology.

Balter said the appeal for a product such as CleverPath is to seamlessly integrate islands of data while eliminating traditionally labor-intensive efforts to find the right bit of information to truly understand what business decisions must be made.

“We’re trying to provide our business people with information at their fingertips.  We want to get out of the business of doing repetitive things,” said Balter. “We’re trying to personalize [business intelligence], so instead of them having to weed through every report, they’ll have different responsibilities within their department.”