What users want from Computer Associates

With the Securities and Exchange Commission sniffing around its books, an angry investor trying to overthrow its board, and Chairman Charles Wang calling it quits after 26 years with the company, Computer Associates made plenty of headlines this year. Unfortunately for the company, many of them had little to do with its broad range of management, security and other technologies.

Forum: What's a top your CA wish list?

"Poor CA. They seem mightily distracted with all the negative reporting on their booking and financial practices," says Jasmine Noel, principal at consulting firm JNoel Research.

To help the company refocus for the new year, we've polled CA customers and watchers to find out where they would most like to see the 26-year-old software giant put its efforts.

Licensing.

Peter Farquharson, manager of technology integration for the city of Saskatoon in Saskatchewan, wants to see CA develop a better pricing model and licensing structure for customers looking to consolidate servers.

"We're trying to consolidate onto fewer servers but are forced to pay high prices based on the processor size regardless of the number of users," he says.

Farquharson says he also wishes CA would change the way it prices software for Microsoft clusters. With two-node clusters, both nodes require CA licenses even though only one is in use at any time, he says. It would be fairer to charge for just one node, he says.

Jim Farmer, manager of systems administration and telecommunications for cable manufacturer Superior Essex in Brownwood, Texas, calls CA's licensing schemes "troublesome." At times, it has taken as long as a month to purchase a valid license for CA software. He would like to see the company streamline the licensing process, perhaps by creating an online licensing service or system.

Farmer also finds having to separately buy Unicenter and the agents it uses to manage infrastructure components to be unnecessary. "Unicenter should have the operating system agents bundled in" as opposed to licensing them per server, he says. "This would get you out and touching lots of machines."

CA changed its licensing model two years ago to let customers purchase software on a month-to-month basis and change contracts when their business needs changed. And the company in 2001 started offering its Unicenter management product in smaller chunks to address specific needs, but customers want to see more give in the company's software licensing.

"Charge for agents for Exchange, Ingres, Oracle and other specialty packages, but give us the infrastructure," Farmer adds.

Microsoft.

Ben Ettlinger, president of the New York Enterprise Modeling User Group, says he hopes CA will help its customers implement and get the most out of their Microsoft .Net products.

"Aside from trying to clearly understand what .Net is all about, IT departments want to leverage the products they already license and see how CA's other offerings will help with .Net," Ettlinger says.

While CA is a Microsoft partner, consultant Noel agrees that CA needs to focus on technologies such as .Net and Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition.