It was time to forget the accounting scandal at CA and look
forward. Giving the keynote speech at the CA World 2007, John Swainson,
president and CEO of CA asserted that there was need for an integrated approach
to realize the promise of IT. CA World 2007 is an annual event of CA's
partners and customers. This year's theme was "Innovation in the Real
World" and was attended by around 6,000 CA partners. On the issue of
emerging new technologies, he said, "None of the new technologies will
fully realize their promise unless we can govern, manage, and secure them,"
adding that, "Governing, managing and securing IT and doing that in an
integrated and holistic way is the ultimate innovation in IT." He also said
that with the emergence of new technologies the IT environments are becoming
more dynamic, diverse, and complex.
Senior Management from top CA customers including AXA,
OppenheimerFunds, Tesco, Embarq also spoke on the way EITM (Enterprise IT
Management) suite of solutions was helping their businesses. Sharing these
thoughts Swainson said, "EITM is CA's vision of how we are going to
transform the management of Information Technology. What we're seeing is a
growing realization that IT can and should be more strategic to the
business." EITM from CA provides a platform that enables businesses to
improve service and productivity, increase return on IT investment, lower
overall cost of IT, manage business risk, enhance levels of regulatory
compliance, and better align IT investments with business priorities. Swainson
concluded, "At CA we are challenging ourselves to innovate and to lead the
charge to harness the enormous power of IT-all the exciting innovations we see
arising every day-and then govern, manage and secure them. By simplifying the
management of IT we can unleash the value of technology and deliver on the
promise of innovation."
Gavin Selkirk, senior VP, Sales, Asia Pacific Japan, elaborating
on CA's strategy for APJ said, "CA's 11% ($400) mn of revenue comes
from APJ, and CA expects double digit growth in the region as compared to single
digit for CA globally. India with 26% is on top of the four-year CAGR growth
projections, list for the region, on a country basis. Amongst other countries in
the list are Australia (12%), New Zealand (13%), China (20%), Malaysia (14%),
the Philippines (16%), Singapore (10%), and Thailand (17%).
Talking about India, Mike Christenson, COO of CA told Dataquest
that "In the emerging global delivery model, the larger IT services
companies, which deliver technologies globally, are bigger opportunities for us
to sell our technology to as customers, in addition to the larger domestic
firms. We want to have a global presence in emerging markets. There is clearly a
momentum and we have to have a strong presence."
The $10 bn Opportunity
CA also announced the formation of a mid-market and storage business unit
focused on companies with 500-5,000 employees and revenues of $100 mn to $1 bn.
The new business unit will deliver CA solutions for this market through CA's
resellers and channel-enabling partners to capitalize on the $10 bn opportunity
represented by the estimated 66,000 such companies worldwide. The need was
necessitated by the strong growth of mid-market companies due to new offerings
and entry into new markets.
John Swainson, president and CEO of CA on India |
"The Indian outsourcing Industry is a special area of interest to CA" |
India is a very important development center for us, which is about 10% of our development activities. They are doing very important projects for us and we see that continuing. On our business side, we have a small base of customers in India as of now. The reason being that, there are a small number of companies in India who are using the kind of management and security solution that me provide. However, there are some larger banks and government institutions, but those have been a minority. The bulk of IT usage in India, up to this point, has been less sophisticated. One area which is of special interest to India is the outsourcing Industry, and we have started to build relationships with 5 or 6 biggest Indian outsourcing companies. We see that continuing and becoming strategic for our business worldwide. There is an emerging Indian IT market that has started to see value in management and security. |
"CA is leveraging its success in the large enterprise space
to create a new generation of solutions for the mid-market," said Bob
Davis, senior vice president and general manager of CA's mid-market and
storage business unit.
"With the help of our worldwide network of resellers-who
are ideally positioned to deliver and support these solutions-we will empower
these companies to realize greater business value from their technology
investments, and reduce the ownership burdens associated with IT," he
added.
"None of the new technologies will fully realize their promise unless we can govern, manage, and secure them" |
As part of its mid-market initiatives, the company also unveiled
CA Recovery Management, a solution specifically designed for the channel to sell
into these targeted accounts. This solution integrates core backup/recovery
capabilities with advanced continuous application availability technologies-enabling
mid-market companies to cost-effectively fulfill their compliance, data
protection and recovery requirements via a single point of control.
"Today's mid-market companies require very sophisticated
storage management capabilities, even though they rarely have the budget or the
in-house technical expertise to build those capabilities from separate, Ã la
carte components," said Todd Pekats, director, strategic alliances at
CompuCom Systems, an IT outsourcing company.
"By packaging multiple complementary technologies in a
single integrated solution, CA is enabling us to address this market need in a
way that allows our customers to avoid the creeping complexity that can easily
wind up over-burdening their modest IT departments," he added.
CA also announced the integration of three of its
industry-leading IT management solutions to enable Service Quality Management.
The solutions include CA Application Performance Management from CA's Wily
Technology division, CA Incident and Problem Management, and CA Service Level
Management.
Sudesh Prasad
sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in
The author was hosted in Las Vegas