New IT development can help you manage your fleet

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Imagine you're managing a car rental company. You want to make sure that all of the cars and vans in your fleet are properly maintained -- their oil is changed and their engines tuned on time, each time.

You may think that all you need is to have a conventional maintenance contract with a reputable car maintenance service company.

However, that may not be adequate, as records may be lost, the mechanics may inadvertently enter the wrong data, or they may perform the wrong deed. And what about customers who abuse your cars by driving them recklessly, steal some of the parts, or even use them for something illicit?

Computer Associates (CA), a software and solution provider based in Islandia, New York, may have what you need to prevent these things from happening.

CA's chief executive officer, Charles B. Wang, gave an example of what the wireless extension of his Unicenter TNG could do. When the sensor device detects abnormal use of a rental car -- one being driven at an average speed of 120 mph for example -- the two-way Unicenter TNG wireless application will send the information to the system.

The Unicenter TNG Fleet Management System will wait until the car comes to a safe stop -- when it is parked, for example -- and then disable it.

When the frustrated customer calls you and complains, you can show him the data, also collected by the interactive Unicenter TNG device in the car right from the time he first stepped into it.

Cars equipped with a Unicenter TNG wireless client are even available today. Inside the 350,000-square-foot World Resource Center exhibition area of the recent CA-World in New Orleans, visitors were able to race on battery-powered go-carts that could go up to 40 miles per hour on a speedway track.

If trouble occurred on the track, such as a driver losing control, Unicenter TNG would stop all the other go-carts safely in time to prevent major accidents from happening.

On a more serious level, the McLaren team's Formula One MP4/12, build by Mercedes, was also equipped with Unicenter TNG. This formidable machine, which can jump from 0 to 200 km per hour in just four seconds and reach a top speed of 350 km per hour, had about 60 sensors on its vital parts.

They allowed the pit crew to continuously keep track of the performance of the car on the track, so that when it entered the pit the crew would know exactly what to do to keep it running in optimal condition.

Similarly, when installed in your fleet of rental cars, Unicenter TNG will also allow you to keep track of the maintenance record of each of them, all achieved by means of wireless connection between the cars and your computer system using GSM, PCS, two-way paging or similar technologies.

This will ensure the best maintenance service that will extend the life of the cars, regardless of their location. This technology is the result of a joint effort by CA and PageNet Advanced Wireless Integration Group (AWIG). PageNet is a provider of paging and advanced information services with coverage throughout continental U.S.

The wireless extension of Unicenter TNG Fleet Management System can also be used to manage non-IT device instrumentation such as ATMs, air-conditioning systems, shop floor manufacturing devices and even vending machines. It can help, for example, adjust the refrigeration of a vending machine based on the number of cans it still holds and the temperature of the machine's surroundings.

Last year, I wrote about Unicenter TNG, the enterprise network management tool and highlighted its intelligent, neural network- based capability to predict performance degradation due to unmet capacity demands, for example. For this kind of task, the tool is really a leader in the industry. Scores of organizations in Indonesia have been using it.

"Unicenter TNG is really a marvel," said Eddy Santoso Jaya, head of Network Management, Bina Nusantara University, Jakarta, where Unicenter TNG is used to manage the campus networks.

Aggressive

During the course of the CA-World event last month, it became very clear how CA, under the leadership of its founder Charles B. Wang, became one of the most aggressive IT companies in the world.

In his keynote speech and interviews with the press, Wang repeatedly emphasized the need to "think outside the box", i.e., to break out of the traditional boundaries of thinking of IT as automation of the accounting system, payroll, and so on.

True to his word, CA has been acquiring other companies whose products complement the company's existing offerings in data warehousing, business intelligence, security, etc.

Its ambition was to take on its "competitor with a three- letter name", as Wang put it. The latest major item in its shopping spree was Platinum Technology International, Inc., which it acquired after an unsuccessful attempt earlier to acquire CSC.

It has also formed strategic alliances with other major vendors and service providers, including Arthur Andersen and 3Com. The alliance with the former will allow CA to offer Arthur Andersen's Virtual Learning Network to its own customers. With 3Com, it has an agreement to make Unicenter TNG also available on the Palm computing platform.

Unquestionably, the company has several promising technologies that may enable it to compete with the other big players, including IBM -- whom it refers to as the "three-letter company".

To compete with IBM in the services industry, it has also formed an organization called Global Professional Services (GPS). In addition to the Unicenter TNG, from which it received a good part of its US$5.3 billion in revenue for fiscal year 1999, there is also a full range of products aimed at the entire range of business organizations.

These products are easily recognizable with the addition of "IT" at the end of the names. So, for storage system solution, for example, the product would be ARCserveIT.

InnoculateIT is a antivirus product that has received several awards. ManageIT is a product suite that manages database, application and systems across the enterprise. And as e-business is gaining speed, CA has also embraced the market with a number of initiatives, including eTrust.

Jasmine TND, a product named after the CEO's daughter, is being aggressively pushed as an enterprise information infrastructure solution.

My 36-hour flight to New Orleans and another 36 hours back were worthwhile not only because it gave me the opportunity to stroll along the famous Bourbon Street at night, but more because it allowed me to sample some of the latest technological applications, including the virtual reality game from Intergraph Professional Services.

And with all the journalists allowed to make as many international calls to anywhere in the world as they needed throughout their stay in New Orleans, I should admit that CA is definitely one of the companies that treat IT journalists the best, making the stay more memorable.

One thing that I do hope is that this 14,000-employee company will not grow too fast too soon, because it does have some great mission-critical business solutions to offer the market. In the past, we have seen too many companies that eventually went under just because they grew too fast.