CA Process Automation, also known as "PAM", is a process automation tool from

CA Technologies CA Technologies, Inc., formerly Computer Associates International, Inc., and CA, Inc., was an American multinational corporation, multinational enterprise software developer and publisher that existed from 1976 to 2018. CA grew to rank as one o ...

, commonly used to automate and orchestrate IT processes. Upon the release of version 3.0 in 2011,

changed the name from CA IT Process Automation Manager to CA Process Automation.

Acquisition

It was acquired by CA when they purchased Washington DC–based ''Optinuity'' where it was known as ''Oasis''.

Differences from other RBA tools

Unlike other process automation tools, PAM has a fully functional client (known as a Touchpoint). While

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

Opalis also has an agent, its Unix agent is not as functional as its Windows agents. The other main vendor tools only use their integrations with other tools to implement the defined processes. The custom operators (objects that make up processes) can be two types; calculations which are executed within the orchestrator engine, these can be written in JavaScript. The other type is a TouchPoint script which can also include an inline script containing process level variables. This allows ITPAM to act as a central repository for scripts to be executed on remote systems. These scripts can be written in any scripting language. The first change that CA made to the tool was to include embedded entitlements manager (EEM). A fully functional entitlement engine for the resources defined to PAM allowing specific allocation of access to groups and users.

Components

PAM has an

open architecture Open architecture is a type of computer architecture or software architecture intended to make adding, upgrading, and swapping components with other computers easy. For example, the IBM PC, Amiga 2000 and Apple IIe have an open architecture supp ...

based on

Java Virtual Machine A Java virtual machine (JVM) is a virtual machine that enables a computer to run Java programs as well as programs written in other languages that are also compiled to Java bytecode. The JVM is detailed by a specification that formally descr ...

Orchestrator

The server component is a

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Application that reads from the Process Library and executes the processes. The Orchestrators can be scaled horizontally by adding more Orchestrators to handle the workload.

Process Library

The Process Library is the database containing the defined processes and operators. It supports databases including Oracle, MS-SQL or

MySQL MySQL () is an Open-source software, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A rel ...

Process designer

The GUI is a Web application used to define processes and create custom operators graphically using drag and drop.

Operations console

A dashboard containing the status of the processes along with a visual representation.

References

*''IT Operations Run Book Automation'', by David Williams, Gartner. 4 May 2007.

External links

Network World article

ITPAM User Forum
{{DEFAULTSORT:CA Process Automation CA Technologies Workflow technology Information technology management