Users applaud CA's integration plans

LAS VEGAS - Customers turned out in droves last week to hear how, after 18 months of internal restructuring, technology acquisitions and product development, Computer Associates intends to win back their faith.

The company's first fee-based CA World drew more than 6,000 attendees; past shows, which were free, attracted about 10,000. Approximately 125 sponsors, including Microsoft, were there.

The company, which in the near future will officially change its name to CA, revealed the details of its Unicenter 11 release, announced an identity management product that uses Netegrity technology acquired last year, and let customers in on its sweeping integration plans. CA intends to incorporate in future software releases a common set of policies, workflows, databases and processes, which the company said will let its products more easily integrate with each other as well as with third-party and open source tools.

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For a company that at one time claimed to have 1,250 products - although it now refuses to give a number - and that completed eight acquisitions in the last year alone, this level of integration is a significant investment of development time and dollars. The company spent about $650 million per year for the past five years, or more than $3 billion, to get this broad integration off the ground.

President and CEO John Swainson added that this is just the beginning: "We aren't doing this because it feels good or because we like pain. We are doing this because it's the best way to get where we need to go." He said the company would continue to put "hundreds of millions of dollars" into its Enterprise IT Management (EITM) strategy.

CA announced 26 new and upgraded products, and sets of products bundled as suites, such as CA Service Availability, which includes an assessment service and products that can use a variety of tools across CA's Unicenter management, eTrust security and BrightStor storage-technology portfolios. Management vendors have been moving away from point products toward delivering suites for some time, but last week CA customers seemed primed to take advantage of the most recent integration effort by the company.

"I plan to use CA technology to condense four management consoles down to one and then move my staff off the mundane task of watching multiple monitors," said Linda Reino, CIO at Universal Health Services in King of Prussia, Pa. "I trust the automation they have built into the software. I have better things for my people to be doing."

Reino expects to have Unicenter Network and Systems Management (NSM) 11 rolled out in three to six months.

Improving identity management

For Kevin Murphy, senior systems analyst at Reynolds & Reynolds in Dayton, Ohio, integration means his previous Netegrity Web access-provisioning products will work better with CA's eTrust identity and access management (IAM) tools. With CA Identity Manager, announced at the show and set to ship by year-end, Murphy told show attendees he would be able to better install IAM processes across Reynolds & Reynolds dealer and customer networks worldwide. He is beta testing Identity Manager 8.