CA Details Neural Agent for Predictive Management
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Stephen Lawson, a senior writer at InfoWorld, has reported that Computer Associates (CA) recently offered more details about predictive technology that will be included in its Unicenter TNG management platform later this year. Yogesh Gupta, senior vice president for product strategy, said in a keynote address at the Enterprise Management Summit that the technology will be able to build complex, three-dimensional models of past events and predict faults without being instructed specifically to look for them.

The neural agent, or "Neugent," now undergoing beta testing, can comprehend a large number of variables that in human hands would require a time-consuming analysis. "Simple policies, anyone can write," Gupta said. "It's the complex policies that get us."

The Neugent will be made available later this year as an add-on to Unicenter TNG, Version 2.2, for predicting availability and performance parameters. Next year, it will be included in a version of the management platform code-named Unicenter, The Next Dimension (TND), that will use it for security, virus protection, scheduling, and other parameters as well. Also next year, the agent will be made available for CA's Harmony applications, including Ingres, Jasmine, and Opal, Gupta said.

CA officials demonstrated a VCR-like network management interface with which administrators could view performance and availability on a WAN topology and fast-forward into the future to see a coming fault. By zooming in on the fault indicator with a Smart Eye tool, administrators could find the future condition -- in this case, a full disk drive -- and send a message to the correct personnel.

Gupta said the agent, based on neural-network technology, can work in two modes: guided learning and self learning. In guided-learning mode, it can be instructed to observe conditions in a particular situation in which problems have been coming up. In self-learning mode, it simply observes anomalies and reports them.

Either way, Gupta said, managers do not have to tell the agent where to look for faults. It can compare statistics from all parts of the system, including networks, systems, and applications, and determine the source of the predicted problem.

In the Harmony applications, the Neugent has been used by a sporting event company to predict attendance. Gupta said that on 90 percent of occasions, the system predicted the attendance correctly to within a 7 percent range. It also has been tested in detecting bank fraud and predicting electric-power demand at a power company, he said. Gupta's keynote emphasized that enterprise management is evolving quickly and no longer requires major business re-engineering or experience in enterprise management. "What you may have thought of as enterprise management a year ago, isn't today," he said. Companies have implemented enterprise management systems in just a few weeks using CA's tools, according to Gupta.

One user at the keynote added a caveat to that assurance. "You can do that if you have the resources," said Christopher Croad, senior engineer leader at Litton PRC, an defense contracting company in Rome, N.Y. Croad said his company has been working on a comprehensive management system for more than a year and has run into numerous problems. "Our biggest barrier is a staff limitation," Croad said. Although the IT department has asked for additional staff, "We spend most of our time solving the problems of the day, and we don't have time to make things better, " he said.

Computer Associates International Inc., in Islandia, N.Y., can be reached at http://www.cai.com