CA WORLD 2001: Wang Braves the Attack

At the recently held CA World 2001 in Orlando, Florida, when Computer
Associates International, Inc president and CEO Sanjay Kumar was asked of his
plans if Sam Wyly won the vote on August 29, he said, "We are trying our
best to put our case to the shareholders... If he wins, we do not have anything
to do. He will have to do everything then."

As this article is being written, the fight between the present management
and Wyly is picking up heat up and allegations and counter-allegations are being
thrown back and forth. The world’s fourth-largest software company has been in
the news since the Texan ranger Wyly, who owns less than 1% of the company,
announced that he wants to change the present board headed by co-founder and
chairman Charles Wang and his protege Sanjay Kumar.

Kumar also came into the firing line from market analysts over the company’s
new pricing model. Under this model, customers have to pay for the use of the
products on monthly basis. "This was purely based on what our customers
demanded. Nothing has changed under the new model. Our revenues are not affected
and we remain number one," defended Wang.

During CA World 2001, both Wang and Kumar seemed prepared for all the
attention from the media, analysts, customers and partners on the Wyly
challenge. And they did not lose any opportunity to drive home the message.
"He wants to split the company into four, which makes no sense. The fact is
that our customers are increasingly demanding more integrated solutions,"
Kumar said. Amid suing and counter-suing by both parties, the management won a
minor battle when CA posted better-than-expected first-quarter results.

For CA, the results couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. The
company is in the process of restructuring its product suite. With more than a
1,000 products, it is said to have one of the largest range among software
companies. During discussions with the Indian media at CA World 2001 in Orlando,
Florida, Wang admitted that his company might have been a bit slow in reacting
publicly. "We need to correct that and would like to use this opportunity
thrown up by Sam to reach out to our shareholders, customers and partners."

CA is betting its future on the growth of e-business. According to one study,
the size of the global e-business solution market is $640 billion. The company
has kept its focus on building the engines for the enablement of e-business and
desisted from entering the solutions and product for e-business processes. In
the latest reorganization of its products range, the company retained its
three-by-six approach, wherein it classifies its products into three strategic
categories (e-business process management, e-business information management and
e-business infrastructure management), and places them across six areas of
e-business:

• Enterprise management;
• Security;
• Storage;
• E-business transformation and integration;
• Portal and knowledge management; and
• Predictive analysis/visualization.

Enterprise Management

In the connected world, enterprises face the challenge of
optimizing their business processes and offering better value to customers on a
continual basis. Even as the Web helps them build better relationship (B2B) with
their suppliers and partners, they are increasingly becoming aware of the
importance of having their internal processes in place. Add to this the
ever-changing Web technologies and smarter devices that used to conduct
businesses–there is little choice for enterprises but to adapt to these
innovations fast and seamlessly.

Security Management

Needless to say, even as better technologies and processes
evolve to offer better network security, even the most secure networks are never
out of danger. The offenders always seem to be one step ahead of the best
security solutions.

According to CA vice-president (security solutions) Simon
Perry, "I do not think there will be a permanent solution for all
security-related problems. There will always be new security threats and
solutions to them. The best way to make a network secure is to add more and more
security layers."

Storage Management

Perhaps, after security, storage is the hottest issue among
enterprise customers today. The demand for larger and more efficient storage
system makes the management of data a crucial factor. According to one study,
the amount of newly-created data will increase from 2 million terabytes in 1999
to 12 million terabytes in 2002. Large companies in the US would be managing 150
terabytes of data by 2003.

Information Management

At the end of the day, enterprises are left with managing the
vast amount of business processes and databases they generate. While the
front-end of information management is being handled through the creation of
portals, there is a need to strengthen the back-end information insfrastructure
too. Enterprises, particularly large ones, will many kinds of hardware and
applications, ranging from mainframes to engineering applications. Efficient
management of these becomes a critical issue.

CA in Asia

Wang claimed he had reason to be bullish on Asia, despite the
slowdown. "China is doing very well," he said. However, on the Indian
market, he warned that it was not investing enough in building infrastructure.
He said: "India should not rely on cheap labour. If you are going to be the
lowest-cost provider on the food chain, someone will come and eat you up."

Manoj Chandran in Orlando,
Florida