CA Integrates Some Infrastructure Management With Unicenter r11

Computer Associates CEO John Swainson Tuesday said the enterprise software giant is set to begin delivering this month a breakthrough in storage-security management integration with the release of its Unicenter r11 network management suite.

Unicenter r11 "is about delivering on the promise of EIM (enterprise information management)," said Swainson, noting that the shipment of the new Unicenter modules will continue into next year. "It integrates, secures and simplifies the enterprise. A lot of people are talking about similar things. We are delivering those things to the marketplace starting later this year. For many customers this will represent an order of magnitude potential to automate their IT infrastructure." The new Unicenter r11 provides a common data repository and user interface making it easier to manage storage and security under a single enterprise infrastructure, said Swainson, who took the helm at CA nine months ago. He said the new Unicenter suite paves the way for storage and security information to be viewed from a single enterprise management command center. The new product suite also provides a "common workflow" so application management can be automated across heterogenous environments, said Swainson.

Martin Tarr, CEO of Tiburon Technologies, a 22-year-old Independence, Ohio, solution provider that serves the mainframe market, credits Swainson with bringing improved field engagement with CA partners. Since CA established a services quota for its direct sales force and is not competing with partners on the services front, Tiburon has closed $50,000 in services business and has some $1 million in deals in the pipeline, Tarr said.

Swainson argued that what he called CA's end-to-end storage-security enterprise information management product set is broader and more complete than what is being brought to the market by EMC or Symantec-Veritas. "EMC is essentially all about secure management of storage devices and Symantec is all about threat management and tying that into obviously storage management as well," he said. "Both of which are important but not nearly sufficient. There is the whole area of how do you manage people. Security is really all about managing people: their identity and what they have access to, the whole area of how do you manage physical assets themselves and the whole area of managing applications," Swainson said.

"Our message to our partners is one of completeness, one of choice and providing them with the most complete road map of products in the industry frankly in a way that is designed to be partner friendly both in terms of the way it is priced and the way it is delivered to the marketplace," he added.

CA currently does about 10 percent of its sales through partners. Swainson said CA's aim is to increase the percentage of channel sales over time to a 30 percent mix of CA's business. That said, he noted that he foresees CA's mainframe Unicenter business continuing to be primarily through the company's direct sales force. Partners should not be under the "delusion" that CA is going to take the full breadth of Unicenter and package it so it is channel ready, Swainson said. "That is not where we think the market wants us to go," he said. "What you will see is us partner more with people to provide embedded antivirus or embedded antispyware capabilities."

CA rivals Symantec and EMC both claim a higher portion of their sales go through the channel. About 50 percent of Veritas storage software sales went through channel partners before being acquired by Symantec earlier this year. EMC, meanwhile, says that about 51 percent of its sales goes through partners.

Swainson said that CA has been careful in terms of which products it moves through channel partners. He noted that CA will move to broaden distribution of iLumin Software Services' message management and archiving software products after acquiring the company on Monday. That product competes with Symantec's KVS product, which provides regulatory archiving for Microsoft's Exchange product set.