Customers To Get View Of New CA At ConferenceCustomers To Get View Of New CA At Conference

At CAWorld 2005, which starts Sunday in Las Vegas, Computer Associates will highlight advances made in the past year as the company has restructured around new management and a new business organization to support what it calls its Enterprise IT Management strategy.

Beginning with a keynote by John Swainson, who became chief executive and president of CA a year ago, the conference will focus on CA's vision of creating a unified and simplified IT management capability. Swainson took over as part of a complete shake-up that came in the wake of federal investigations into financial reporting practices by the previous management team.

"The company has been transforming, and we've made significant changes over the past year," says Mark Barrenechea, executive VP of technology strategy and chief technology architect for CA.

CA has reorganized its business around four major efforts in security, storage, enterprise systems management, and business service optimization, all of which have been bolster by separate acquisitions over the past year valued at $1.2 billion, Barrenechea says.

The company plans to show how the acquisitions of Netegrity and PestPatrol for security management, Concord Communications for enterprise systems management, Niku for business-service optimization, and iLumin Software Services for storage, have been integrated into its UniCenter, release 11, management suite, he says.

"The management and security marketplace is just too crowded," Barrenechea says. "There are too many vendors in this space, and it's one of the last of the major market segments to have a shakeout. The operating system market is down to handful of vendors, and the application market is down to a handful of market leaders."

The leaders in the previous market shakeouts have emerged by providing "bold transformational product offerings," he says. CA plans to do the same, and "it starts with being comprehensive and being able to offer integrated processes."

CAWorld will provide a good platform for the company to demonstrate to its customers how far the company has progressed in the past year, Barrenechea says. "We understand, however, that this is a multiyear process, and I don't want to suggest that everything is complete," he says. "But I think it becoming very obvious with our new CEO that our number one focus is being customer centric, and it's going to show very visibly."