NEW ORLEANS -- In a keynote speech Monday morning, Computer Associates International President Sanjay Kumar gave CA World attendees an around-the-world look at where company products are right now, stressing the tight integration of the company's Unicenter TND systems and network management tool and the company's new Jasmine ii platform, which will be released this week.

In fact, the general release of TND hinges on Jasmine ii, which is why TND, which stands for The Next Dimension, remains in beta, Kumar said. He also confirmed that the show, which has ran here the past six years, will move next year to Orlando, Fla. and will take place in steamy July.

Otherwise, Kumar combined his product demonstrations with the abiding theme at this year's user conference: "We're re-engineering our company to more aggressively support e-business."

Kumar indicated that what is new is the depth to which CA is devoting its resources to e-business, with "a transformation everywhere in the company." Apparently central to that transformation is the release of Jasmine ii, the single most heavily touted product here this week.

Echoing a sentiment heard among users and the media struggling to understand precisely what Jasmine ii is and what it does, Kumar said that part of his "frustration is that it's very difficult to explain this stuff."

A Jasmine ii demonstration made some inroads in clearing up the confusion. Basically, the software lets companies integrate data from different databases, allowing managers and others along the corporate chain to monitor Web sites and business processes and, with predictive technology used in the software, to quickly make decisions before problems arise.

Using CA's neural intelligence agents, dubbed Neugents, Jasmine ii also allows managers to predict possible problems. For instance, Neugents can be "taught" to analyze deliveries from suppliers to let managers know when a supplier is not going to ship items in a timely manner.

Those accessing business-to-business and business-to-consumer Web sites might not realize what is happening behind the scenes, but the result they should notice is richer Web sites with 3D images and automatically updated information, including personalized data, according to CA.

In the example Kumar used in his keynote, a customer accesses a computer vendor Web site operating on the Jasmine ii platform. After checking out 3D images of computers, images that can be rotated for different views, the consumer chooses a machine to buy and places an order. The manager then receives an alert that the order will be late in shipping because the hard-drive supplier is not going to send needed hard drives in time.

A Neugent also will let the manager know about the supplier's overall likely future performance and, upon assessing a negative prediction, the manager can get rolling on finding alternative suppliers.

Jasmine ii offers both COM (Component Object Model) and Enterprise JavaBeans support and is designed to allow for quick integration of XML-based data into the Jasmine ii infrastructure for faster building of Web sites.

Additional details about Jasmine ii will follow in later reports.

CA World continues here through Friday.

Computer Associates International Inc., in Islandia, N.Y., is at www.cai.com.

Nancy Weil is a Boston correspondent for the IDG News Service, an InfoWorld affiliate.

www.infoworld.com

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