Big Integration Plans Under Way At Computer AssociatesBig Integration Plans Under Way At Computer Associates

It's been more than four years since Computer Associates made its last major acquisition, when it bought Sterling Software Inc. for $4 billion. But reputations die hard and some might be surprised to learn that CA, which fueled its growth by buying more than 80 companies in 26 years, doesn't rely solely on acquired companies for technology innovation. In fact, CA spent $640 million--or $40,000 per employee--on research and development in its recently completed fiscal 2004.

At the heart of that spending is a goal to tightly integrate the software CA accumulated through those acquisitions and extend its capabilities, says Mark Barrenechea, CA's senior VP of product development. Barrenechea joined CA last June from Oracle, where he was senior VP in charge of application development, and oversees CA's staff of 5,000 developers. "Our product strategy is to make more complete what we have, integrate what we have, and maintain its openness," he said during an interview Tuesday.

CA's software is integrated at what Barrenechea calls the "component level," allowing individual products within specific categories such as storage management to work with each other. But Barrenechea says the company is working to integrate its products at higher levels across product categories such as storage management, security, operations management, and software-life-cycle management. That way security and operations management apps, for example, can work as a single business process, share data, and present users with a common interface.

CA plans over time to offer more of its products as hosted services, particularly in the operations management and security areas, Barrenechea says. And while Linux, Unix and Windows are major platforms for CA's software, the vendor continues to invest heavily in developing software for IBM z/OS mainframes--Barrenechea says IBM last year doubled the amount of mainframe computing power it sold, as measured in millions of instructions per second.

Barrenechea won't rule out other acquisitions, particularly of small companies, to round out CA's product line. In March, for example, CA bought Miramar Systems Inc., a developer of desktop-migration tools. At the same time, some older products that don't fit with the company's strategic direction, such as the Eureka report-writer application, will be maintained but not aggressively developed and marketed, he says.

Barrenechea says recent changes in CA's top executive ranks haven't affected his role at CA. He reports to CEO Kenneth Cron, as does Sanjay Kumar, who was reassigned from CEO to chief software architect.