Intelligent Portal To Make Employees' Jobs EasierIntelligent Portal To Make Employees' Jobs Easier

Computer Associates this week is unveiling Internet portal software that introduces intelligence into the content-delivery process. CleverPath Portal version 3.5, originally a part of CA's Jasmine product line, provides businesses with a platform for building a single Web-based interface to numerous applications, content, and documents.

The portal supports wireless access and comes with three options: Enterprise Content Manager, for creating and publishing content on the Internet from the portal; Aion Business Rules Expert, which lets IT managers set rules and personalize the portal for individual users; and Predictive Analysis Server, which includes the latest version of CA's Neugents, artificial-intelligence agents that could, for instance, help the software automatically send information to individual mailboxes based on a person's job role or interests.

CleverPath starts at $10,000 on low-end Intel servers and increases to $944,000 for use on the biggest Unix systems. Enterprise Content Manager starts at $35,000 and Aion Business Rules Expert starts at $65,000; pricing for Predictive Analysis Server varies.

The combination of CleverPath with Predictive Analysis Server appeals to Todd Barton, director of design at Iwitness Inc., an Englewood, Colo., maker of electronic records-management software. He says the combination will let his customers more easily find all documents related to an E-mail message, significantly improving their ability to manage content. "We'd like to implement it as soon as we can," he says.

CA also is launching a platform called AllFusion to consolidate its application life-cycle management products. It's all part of a broader repackaging and rebranding initiative to help the vendor better manage its 1,200 disparate products, from network management to portals to mainframe security.

That's good for CA's customers, says Evan Quinn, an analyst at the Hurwitz Group. "It helps customers understand CA better," he says. As part of the effort, Quinn expects the vendor to pull at least some of its products off the market. "They have four reporting products but need only one," he says. "Product aggregation is good."