CA Clarity™ G2000 Architecture

Let Strategic Vision, Not Technical Constraints, Drive Your Enterprise Portfolio Management

The CA Clarity system guarantees that your Enterprise Portfolio Management implementation will be driven by your business goals and strategic vision, rather than by technology constraints.  That's why we built our G2000 architecture with comprehensive functionality to meet the challenges of all deployments, large and small.

Our architecture includes massive scalability, extensive and low-cost configurability, third-party application interfaces, global availability, Precision Security™ functionality and ubiquitous platform support.  We can handle enterprise-wide customer installations with tens of thousands of users spanning dozens of countries. 

Because CA Clarity was built from the ground up to fully embrace J2EE, it provides the standards-based services required to deliver scalable and reliable deployments and Web services.  It is portable across heterogeneous platforms and interoperable with other J2EE-compliant applications. 

Other benefits of our G2000 architecture include:

    A client tier that eliminates desktop maintenance headaches, as its ultra-thin Web client
 requires no desktop software installations or downloads, no Java applets and no ActiveX
 controls.
    An application tier that serves as a gateway between the client and data tiers, with an
 underlying J2EE application server that controls Web, integration, business logic and
 persistence services and provides common application functions such as caching, security,
 globalization, configuration and workflow. 
    A data tier that contains both a transactional and a business intelligence repository. 
   An integrated data mart that facilitates rapid reporting without negatively impacting the
 performance of day-to-day system use.

 

architecture_chart

Three-tier, J2EE compliant architecture offers massive scale
and global availability.

CA Clarity can be deployed in a clustered configuration to offer the highest possible levels of performance and availability.  The CA Clarity System Administration tool uses an intuitive, Web-based console to centralize the configuration and management of clusters within multiple sites.   Additionally, CA Clarity supports horizontal scaling by replicating services, such as the application server, onto multiple services in a cluster.  The result is massive application scalability as well as fault tolerance and fast failover.

Substantially Reduce the Cost and Complexity of Integration
Organizations can readily combine the power of CA Clarity with legacy systems, enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM and Microsoft Office tools such as Excel using the XOG™ (XML Open Gateway) service, a comprehensive set of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and Java-based APIs. XOG also supports Enterprise Application Integration products through infrastructure middleware.  XOG preserves data integrity through the enforcement of business rules. Information exchange through integration APIs accesses the same business logic as when a user manually enters data to ensure consistency and reliability. 

CA Clarity XOG APIs adhere to open industry standards such as SOAP-enabled Web Services, JDBC, and JMS.  Because the APIs are XML-based, even major system updates have minimal impact on the customer's integration.  In addition, the APIs allow for both real-time and batch invocations to define when information is transferred.

architecture_chart2

Open standards facilitate integration of any application with CA Clarity.

Implement a Solution That Breaks Down All Location Barriers
CA Clarity was designed to allow all users to have access to the same information no matter where they are located, ensuring that everyone is on the same page.  CA Clarity is a simultaneously multi-lingual application, with Unicode support for double-byte languages to allow users to work on the same installation and experience the application in their native language/locale combinations.  The locale function enables users in different time zones to receive all events and notifications in their local time.  And, CA Clarity supports multi-currency for cost, benefit, expense, rate, billing, invoicing and charge-back transactions.   

Increasingly, mobile workers using low-bandwidth leased lines or PDAs or notebook computers over wired or wireless modems are challenged by network bandwidth issues.  To benefit these users, CA Clarity compresses HTML content, thereby using an average of seven times less network bandwidth than uncompressed HTML.

Achieve Precision Security
CA Clarity offers Precision Security functionality to protect a company's sensitive project, product, financial and personnel information.  For instance, companies can deploy CA Clarity so that all communication from server to browser is sent via a SSL-encrypted connection.  And, CA Clarity can integrate with an existing LDAP system for authentication and authorization, making the implementation process even more efficient and supporting single sign-on deployments. 

Rather than rely solely on individual user information to grant or deny access, CA Clarity offers much more powerful and flexible security administration based on roles, groups and organizational breakdown structures (OBS).  Roles and groups define the rights a user has to perform actions, and the OBS determines what the user can see and act upon.  The combination of these two security models makes security management a far less tedious and time consuming process as users change jobs or move around in the organization.  Additionally, OBS-based Precision Security allows companies to construct virtual walls between business units that share a common system, but that still need to operate independently.

Extend Without Compromising Smooth and Fast Upgrades
CA Clarity Studio allows easy tailoring of business objects, such as portfolios, projects, resources and ideas, without programming or customization using PowerMods™ functionality.  During upgrades, all modifications made using CA Clarity Studio are automatically reflected in the new installation so that upgrades are quick and easy. 

Choose the Best Platform
CA Clarity runs on industry-leading operating systems (AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux and Windows), relational databases (Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle 8i and Oracle 9i) and application servers (BEA WebLogic and IBM WebSphere) to give companies the opportunity to select the platform that will be the most cost effective and efficient for their installation and to allow organizations to take advantage of resources that have already been selected as corporate standards.