Business and IT executives should not have to choose between their desire to innovate for future growth and the desire to avoid disrupting current operations. Enterprise innovation that embraces and extends existing infrastructure and applications is possible through modern software architectures such as web services and SOA - as long as those investments perform competitively when measured against alternative platforms and they are able to be modernized to participate in these architectures. CA has a strong history of both honing CA IDMS' competitive performance and availability advantages and modernizing CA IDMS to keep current with advances in software architectures and development practices. This paper discusses how CA's continuous investments have enhanced and modernized CA IDMS; how enterprises can leverage CA IDMS; performance and availability advantages in innovative software projects; and the benefits of innovative reuse of existing CA IDMS environments.