CA WORLD 2002: A Breath of Fresh Air

September made the mayor of New York, the mayor of America. It sure was an

intense test of leadership. And Rudy Guiliani was there to keynote at the CA

World 2002, the annual technology confluence of Computer Associates

International held at Orlando, Florida. Over 7,000 welcomed Guiliani with a

standing ovation. He didn’t dwell on the horrors of the ‘day’. Instead, he

spoke about the acts of courage by New Yorkers, drawing insightful parallels

from those acts of courage and leadership to the endless possibilities of the

American economic system. One got the best definition of courage from Guiliani

that day- "Courage is not the absence of fear- it is the act of being

afraid and managing that fear so that you can achieve the task at hand".

Applying it to business, he said, "Capitalism is the greatest economic

system in history, and capitalism rewards courage and leadership".

The new CA



The third-largest independent software vendor after Microsoft and Oracle, CA

is passing through difficult times like many other American businesses. Sri

Lankan-born Sanjay Kumar, president and CEO, CA puts in 80- hour weeks running

CA and keeping critics at bay. The company did receive a negative SEC inquiry

into its accounting practices and Platinum integration. But Kumar seem unfazed-

"We are confident of getting past it unscathed", he said.

The new business model with its advantages has the disadvantage of lower

revenue and earnings realization initially. CA’s annual revenue in fiscal 2000

was $ 6.103 billion but the ‘as reported" revenue of fiscal 2001 is down

to $ 4.198 billion. The company claims that with the old model, investors were

not able to clearly see or interpret the value in CA’s business whereas the

new business model gives improved visibility into the revenue stream. Wrote

Sanjay Kumar in the annual report, "Change isn’t easy, especially when

you introduce a revolutionary way to deliver measurable value...but the benefits

to our clients and our investors overwhelmingly reinforced our decision". A

hefty brand-building budget aims to create visibility and communicate the ‘new

CA’.

For the customer



Call it a grand trip back to the basics of business. At CA World 2002,

Sanjay Kumar announced ‘customer focus’ as its key agenda. It may sound

cliché but Sanjay Kumar announced several key measures that aim to put the

agenda in motion. The first step was to make CA products easy to buy and pay

for. The company is known for its voracious appetite for acquisitions, each of

which added to its product basket. Unwieldy as it was, customers found it

difficult to buy CA products and understand its roadmap. In October 2000, a new

business model was announced that sought to provide customers with flexible

annual subscriptions to CA’s software product licenses. The product family was

trimmed by reorganizing products along clear categories.

The subscription model and the reorganized portfolio helps customers to

license only specific functionality and services needed which in turn helps

establish ROI and technology fit. It also helps companies pace their software

investments to the growth of their business.

The next step is aimed at making customer interaction easier. A self-service

website called CustomerConnect, announced at CA World 2002, is available to

manage account information, download or order new product releases and find

technical information. A 650-person customer relations’ organization focused

on creating customer relationships by closely tracking, analyzing and enhancing

business value delivered to individual customers has been constituted. CA’s

sales-force, over 3000 worldwide, has a new compensation and reward system based

on customer satisfaction.

So now, CA has a stream of six product categories and 1244 products. At CA

World 2002, Sanjay Kumar announced reorganization at the top echelons. In

effect, brand unit managers with independent authority and responsibility for

the six categories would articulate the company’s technology and its offerings

to customers.

The six categories and brands into which CA is now organized are: Unicenter-Systems

Management, eTrust-Security, BrightStor-Storage Management, AdVantage-Data

management, AllFusion-Application Lifecycle Management, and CleverPath-Portals

and Business Intelligence. Its leadership in infrastructure management and

information management aside–storage, security, wireless and web-services are

the thrust areas that CA seeks to go forward with this year.

The ‘center’ piece



The jewel in CA’s crown has been its enterprise management product family–Unicenter.

Named as the ‘Product of the Nineties’ by Information Week for its market

leadership from 1992 till date, Unicenter has been like an amoeba, changing

shape but preserving form. It used to be a bulky base product, sort of a

substratum that had various plugs onto it. This limited its market, for only

large enterprises saw value in investing in a base enterprise management product

that took long to implement.

Customers were looking for bite-sized pieces that are faster to implement. In

July 2001, Unicenter became available in modular form. Combined with the

subscription-based pricing model, it helped accelerate the Unicenter business.

Says Yogesh Gupta, CTO, CA, "Given the volatile economy, customers are

looking out for faster RoI and industry analysts are extremely skeptical of

drawn-out, costly enterprise software deployments". At CA World 2002,

Unicenter capabilities got extended to wireless management. The two new

Unicenter solutions extend management capabilities to cover wireless network

infrastructures and mobile devices. This is in response to the increasing

population of mobile devices and wireless networks that form part of an

organization’s IT infrastructure. Interestingly, at NetWorld+Interop, the mega

network technologies event, Unicenter is pressed into service to manage and

service the giant wired and wireless network put up by Key3Media Events, the

show organizers.

CA takes pride in its portal technology that like its enterprise management

services, extends portal services across all its other technology components.

Simply put, portals provide aggregated web-based access to diverse enterprise

content and applications to all entities like customers, employees, suppliers

and partners. CleverPath Portal 4.0, the newest version, consolidates all forms

of data into personalized, intuitive environments that can be accessed from

desktop browsers, WAP phones and wireless PDAs. The key here is to make

information available, cutting across sources and their native formats, to

ensure collaboration and intelligent decision-making. Sure, it has to have

industry-strength scalability so that million of concurrent users can access the

portal. CleverPath recently demonstrated its ability to support over 2.4 million

users delivering near linear scalability.

What’s new in CleverPath 4.0? The version is fully compliant with Web

services standards like SOAP, UDDI and XML. One can rapidly integrate it with

third-party applications via Web services for both desktop and wireless access.

The size and format of the content can be automatically tailored depending on

the device it is accessed from. Data can be visualized graphically in 2D/ 3D

from leading to better interpretation. Also, in keeping with the Linux wave, one

can access data from even mainframes that run Linux. CA is exploiting the

potential of its portal technology by tying up with partners that offer portlets,

over 200 of which are already available.

Piecing it together



CA’s other product areas are application life-cycle management, data

management, storage management, and security. BrightStor is CA’s storage

management solutions suite. At CA World 2002, it unveiled its vision of

next-generation storage management solutions. This would entail a new layer and

class of solutions called Enterprise Storage Automation (ESA) which has

functional intelligence, dynamic provisioning, policy definition and other

advanced capabilities. This provides a Unicenter-like management capability to

storage. CA also announced the first deliverable in ESA, the BrightStor Portal,

which simplifies the management of storage resources across heterogeneous

protocols and vendor hardware platforms. Storage resource management includes

empowering storage administrators with the capability to discover, report,

monitor and analyze both distributed and mainframe storage resources. The

BrightStor SAN Manager has entered into initial beta phase and the solution

extends management into the SAN.

In the security area, CA has announced some innovative work to stake claim to

a higher order in the security solutions market. eTrust 20/20 is an enterprise

security solution that combines both physical and IT security with high-grade

visual insight that empowers corporate security managers to pinpoint even the

subtlest indicators in complex work environments. The solution is patent-pending

and has a been termed as ‘ground-breaking’ in its approach to combine both

physical and IT security.

Learning to be seer



Questions posed by many journalists at the CA World 2002 echoed the popular

perception that CA never led innovation in technology. To this, Sanjay Kumar

retorted calmly, "What do you think Unicenter is? Did we acquire it from

outside?"

Increasingly, it is clear that CA intends to lead with technology innovation

too. Thought leadership and future gazing is rather important to CEOs and CTOs

of technology companies with the likes of Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Scott

McNealy having mastered the art of preaching a technology vision and rallying

the world round it. One could see enough examples of such pontification coming

in from CA, which is still learning to perfect the art. In his keynote, Yogesh

Gupta, the CTO, held the point, " Pervasive computing is the transition-

from technology having to be sought out to be used - to a situation where

powerful technology is used in all aspects of our business and personal

lives".

Gupta’s example: take the impact pervasive computing and Web services will

have on a car. Daimler Chrysler believes that in the near future, 25 % of the

value of a car will come from software, as opposed to a meager 2% today. Instead

of limited computing power tracking the engine and basic maintenance, cars of

the future will be able to interface with calendars, provide driving directions,

and even send instant messages. Says Gupta, "This kind of integration

presents unlimited opportunity and several significant -but not insurmountable-

challenges". Through this example, Gupta gives the basis for CA’s

technology direction- management of infrastructure, security, wireless

applications, portalization and the like, to gain leadership in the e-business

space.

The reorganization of brands, the new business model, the technology

visioning process, and the ‘customer focus’ agenda- all point at a departure

in the way things used to be done at CA. All of this calls for oodles of

courage, of the Guiliani variety.

Easwardas SatyEn in Orlando, FL.