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.