"We simplified the licensing of the product and included playbooks that detail repeatable methodologies based on years of experience to help companies support ITIL or other best practice frameworks," says Kathy Shoop, vice president of CA Service Management.

Scheduled to be available in December, Service Desk Manager 12 will be priced "as an attractive upgrade for existing customers" of the previously stand-alone applications that are now bundled together.

CA's gets SaaS-y

CA also announced at the conference that it will broaden is SaaS offerings with the release of Clarity PPM (Project & Portfolio Manager) On Demand, a hosted pay-per-use version of the vendor's Clarity PPM 12 enterprise project management software. This release marks the third application CA delivers via a SaaS model -- the other two being CA GRC Manager On Demand and CA Instant Recovery On Demand -- and company officials say a hosted services model currently works for more than 1,000 customers worldwide.

"Customers don't want to operate a lot of infrastructure and don't have the staff to learn new management applications or the time to maintain them," says Jules Ehrlich, senior vice president of CA On Demand. "It provides a rapid time to value for customers and frees them from worrying about how to operate the application technically."