Al Porco, CIO at Central Brooklyn Family Health Network in New York, said he has been using Unicenter Asset Management for two years and will put the new r11 version in production within the next month. The most important new feature is "being able to have in one place the full life cycle of an asset, which will help in making intelligent business decisions," he said.

A beta version of the tool has already helped Porco identify which laptop PCs in production use at the health care provider had been identified by a vendor as having motherboard problems. "We got them replaced before they failed," he said.

Rich Ptak, an analyst at Ptak, Noel & Associates in Amherst, N.H., said the new suite of products is "an enormous step forward for CA." Ptak added that he has not seen CA's major competitors in the management tools market, including IBM's Tivoli unit, Hewlett-Packard Co. and BMC Corp., demonsrate the same ability to compare different kinds of information.