The comparison is intended for buyers running a meaningful CA contract footprint at or near renewal who are evaluating exit pathways across the API gateway and AIOps lines, the ESP and automation lines, or the identity lines. The table is organised by product family. For each family the renew pathway is held against the most commonly evaluated modern replacement target on a five year cost and migration horizon. Numbers are drawn from the Desk's verified contract data and from comparable signed migration cases inside the master plan.
The table does not provide a recommendation. The right answer depends on the buyer's existing CA module footprint, the depth of CA paper carried forward across prior renewals, regulated industry constraints, and the commercial terms achievable on either side. Buyer specific factors including an in flight CA audit, a recent CA entitlement reconciliation, or a parallel CA portfolio rationalisation materially shift the calculation in either direction.
| Dimension | CA (renew) | Modern replacement (migrate) | Hybrid co exist (stage) |
|---|---|---|---|
| API gateway and AIOps | CA API Gateway plus DX AIOps renewal. Legacy entitlements carried across prior cycles. Typical renewal uplift +18 to +34 percent on the standing model in 2026. | Migration to a single modern API platform plus a separate AIOps platform. Typical migration cost $420,000 to $1.6M at large enterprise scale across both lines. | Carve out lower volume API surfaces to a modern platform while retaining CA on the regulated and legacy traffic. Coexistence window of 24 to 36 months. |
| ESP and automation | CA Workload Automation ESP renewal. MSU entitlement complexity high where the ESP estate overlaps mainframe capacity. Typical renewal uplift +14 to +28 percent on the standing model in 2026. | Migration to a cloud native scheduler plus orchestration platform. Typical migration cost $280,000 to $1.1M at large enterprise scale. Mainframe job retention adds bridge platform cost. | New workloads scheduled on the modern platform. Existing ESP jobs retained on the legacy platform during a multi year decommission. Bridge integration to be priced separately. |
| Identity | CA SiteMinder, CA Advanced Authentication, and CA Identity Manager renewal. Federation and risk based authentication entitlement priced on user counts. Typical renewal uplift +16 to +26 percent on the standing model in 2026. | Migration to a modern IDaaS provider with SSO, MFA, and identity governance. Typical migration cost $220,000 to $940,000 at large enterprise scale. Workforce identity migration usually phased ahead of customer identity migration. | New applications onboarded to the IDaaS provider. Existing CA SiteMinder integrations retained until application refactor or sunset. Coexistence window of 24 to 48 months. |
| 5 year total cost (illustrative, mid enterprise) | $11.2M to $17.4M at the negotiated CA range across the API plus AIOps plus ESP plus identity bundle, over five years, before any audit settlement adjustment. | $8.4M to $14.6M at the negotiated modern platform range across the equivalent bundle. Migration cost adds $0.9M to $3.6M one off. Combined five year total $9.3M to $18.2M. | $10.6M to $15.8M combined run rate across CA legacy and modern platforms during coexistence. Decommission timing materially shifts the final cost. |
| Audit posture | Audit activity on the CA estate at elevated frequency in 2026, with audit notice frequency tied to ESP and identity entitlement reconciliations. Legacy CA paper carries audit risk where entitlement records are incomplete. | No audit exposure on the migrated platforms past the cutover. CA residual exposure persists for the duration of the contractual record retention period. | CA audit exposure continues at the reduced run rate of the legacy entitlement. Modern platform audit exposure is nil on usage based subscription terms. |
| Operational risk | Operational risk concentrated in the depth of legacy CA paper. Continued vendor support depends on the renewed contract. | Operational risk concentrated in the migration window. Parallel run discipline and rollback planning material to the risk profile. | Operational risk distributed across both platforms. Integration and identity bridge are the dominant risk areas. |
The five year total cost comparison shows that on the headline numbers the modern replacement pathway is most often the lower absolute cost on the API plus AIOps and the identity lines, while the renewal pathway is most often the lower absolute cost on the ESP and automation line where mainframe job retention raises the migration burden. The hybrid co exist pathway sits between the two on cost and is most often justified on operational risk grounds rather than on price.
The renewal trajectory is more material than the table can fully express. Buyers with a CA contract carried across three or more prior cycles, with combined entitlement across API plus identity plus ESP, or with a recent CA compliance review face a different renewal risk profile from buyers whose CA contract is in good order and tightly scoped. The audit settlement adjustment on the renewal side of the comparison is a buyer specific number that requires reconciliation against the buyer's entitlement records and the auditor's recent posture across comparable customers.
The Desk publishes this comparison in its evenhanded form and does not recommend any pathway. The buyer side workplan for each pathway is described in the relevant service and practice pages linked below.