CA Needs To Simplify More Than Just Its Name To Succeed

Computer Associates has expended a lot of effort over the past two years trying to polish its tarnished image. Last week, the company said it's fine-tuning its strategy--as well as its name and logo--to provide a more manageable framework for its software that the vendor believes can establish it as the integration kingpin in the IT-management industry, much as SAP defined the applications market in the early 1990s.

Now known as CA, the company has reengineered its expansive product line, which--in combination with about $1.2 billion in acquisitions--establishes a new standard for systems and security management, company executives said at the CA World conference in Las Vegas last week.

"We had become known as a company with a lot of products, but we were not the best in any," acknowledged president and chief executive John Swainson. "CA is a changed company. I came in with the perspective of an outsider with the primary task of making people believe again the power of CA."

Although he said the company has made significant progress in corralling what was an unwieldy assortment of software products, the result remains a complex array of interactive platforms and specific software components CA says will "unify and simplify" the management of enterprisewide IT environments.

For CA to be relevant, it needs to establish its products as the center of an evolving IT industry that's seeking ways to build increasingly automated management capabilities around industry best practices and standards-based frameworks like the Information Technology Infrastructure Library.

Having undergone a reorganization earlier this year into business units focused on storage management, security management, enterprise-systems management, and business-service optimization, CA says customers will use its new and enhanced software components and platform modules to more effectively manage enterprise environments across strategic areas of interest.

Last week, CA added 26 products to its Enterprise IT Management software line and 80 software components, most of which are part of its Unicenter release 11 management suite. Major new components include an integration system that provides a workflow engine, management database, and shared IT policies.

Tighter Integration
More than 100 customers have been testing CA's new offerings, including Harry Butler, support-center manager at EFW Inc., a builder of military and aerospace electronics systems. The system "is nothing really new," he says. "I've been using many of these products for seven years. But the good part is everything is now integrated a lot tighter with one centralized database."

Steve Lanzi, CIO of paper products supplier Bowater Inc., also says the integration of CA's products into what he calls a more-manageable environment can provide incremental improvements, such as helping him shave two-tenths of a percent off his IT budget, which currently operates at 1% of revenue.

"We should be able to more quickly respond and shift our IT resources to higher-value activities and automate the lowest-value activities," Lanzi says. With improved insight into its IT environment, Bowater in some cases will be able to "beat outsourcing" and return in-house some activities that are performed by third parties.

CA's new marketing mantra is "Believe Again." Just how much its customers start believing hinges on how well the company's collection of system-management tools really delivers as a single management platform for running the IT factory.