Computer Associates Founder RetiresComputer Associates Founder Retires

Charles Wang retired Monday as chairman of Computer Associates, the company he founded in 1976. CA's board supported the wishes of the 58-year old Wang that Sanjay Kumar immediately take over as chairman, adding that position to the posts of president and CEO that he's held since 2000. Wang will become chairman emeritus and focus on his charitable endeavors.

That's a far cry from the tiger of industry who built CA through acquisitions that often met resistance but almost always succeeded. Wang was the polar opposite of an open-source software proponent. He was a zealous spokesman against software piracy and always stood up for the rights of independent software vendors to receive compensation for the value they provided.

No other single person has been bigger or more important to the network- and systems-management market than Wang. CA recently started shipping simple products that get work done after years of selling the complex Unicenter framework, one of a handful in the industry that are expensive and difficult to maintain and run. But despite some misfires, Wang and CA took over the brunt of the mainframe-management market. He also got CA into lower-end storage management. In addition, he hand-picked Kumar, who's steering CA, which has always been hammered for unfair CPU size-based pricing, to flexible pricing including paying by the drink.

Kumar takes on the additional duties of chairman amid an investigation into CA's accounting by regulators. In recent months, the company has overhauled its board and named a corporate governance executive.

Nine of the board's dozen directors are outsiders.

If the Department of Justice clears CA of accounting wrongdoing, Wang's legacy will be one of a man who sticks to his guns, even when it means being unpopular. Mike Karp, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates, says CA has been making progress under "great financial pressure." And Karp sees intelligent products under CA's BrightStor storage management "wraparound" that wouldn't be there before. "If you think of all the IT lifetimes since 1976," Karp says, "maybe it's just time for him to pass the mantle."

Shanghai, China-born Wang is active in charitable causes such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and other philanthropic activities focused on children. He and Kumar also own the National Hockey League's New York Islanders, which they bought in 2000.

Computer Associates, which had fiscal 2002 revenue of $2.96 billion, makes more than 800 software products, including enterprise management, business intelligence, storage, and network-management applications.