This announcement is one of 10 enterprise IT management and governance solutions CA announced Tuesday to help businesses navigate IT management issues intensified by a US-led economic recession. While CA sees this as good news for larger companies looking to optimize their own IT infrastructure and decrease operating costs, more sophisticated automation software offerings are bound to discourage at least some enterprise businesses to put off outsourcing plans at least until the economy becomes more stable.

According to CA's announcement, Automation Manager increases the speed of data center service delivery, improves application configuration and availability, and optimizes virtualization and environmental IT initiatives. Last week, CA announced its partnership with power and cooling services provider APC by Schneider Electric (www.apc.com) to create a full set of solutions for assessing and fully optimizing data center energy consumption.

The company said that CA Data Center Automation Manager combines a dynamic, rules-based policy engine that allows for more powerful, intelligent automation decisions. By enabling IT to make better informed decisions regarding server consolidation, power conservation and provisioning, Automation Manager reduces operating costs and power usage.

"Data centers are increasingly complex and often operate statically -- meaning they are unable to meet changing business demands," Gartner Research's Donna Scott said in a statement. "By implementing real-time infrastructure architectures, IT is empowered to provide agile, optimized services to the business while meeting changing business demands "Automation enables IT to reduce costs while improving service quality and agility."