* Impressions from CA's analyst meeting
First, an apology. Many people wrote me about last week’s column in which I spoofed spam. Spoofity spoof, spoofity spoof (a literary allusion, but who will get it?). Most of the humanware I encountered seem to have enjoyed it. Some spam filtering software apparently did not. My editors did their best to “sanitize” the thing, among other things removing my reference to the very populous country situated in West Africa between Cameroon, Chad and N_____. Spam filters apparently pick up on that sort of thing. So, apologies if last Thursday’s newsletter was caught in the spam filter. You can still see it in the Network World archives.
As for those among you who read the newsletter and then consigned it to the spam bucket by hand, well (insert rolling of eyes here) just keep banging the rocks together, guys.
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Last week along with several other analysts, I spent a few days with CA’s senior management team. Here are my impressions of what I saw.Earlier this year CA changed its name from Computer Associates to CA. Based on what I’ve been seeing, more than the name is changing.CEO John Swainson continues to impress as a straight shooter, which does a lot to increase the company’s credibility with the analyst community. Under him, the company will be focusing on four management concepts for the coming year: data, security, lifecycle, and systems and storage. Importantly for us, the expectations for the BrightStor storage group – which didn’t show much growth last year – are now substantially higher than they were previously. Here is what we can expect. First, a significant philosophical realignment has occurred, with the result that storage and security now seem to be very closely interrelated. This will of course tie in nicely with another obvious area of emphasis at CA: managing regulatory compliance.
CA has made two significant investments that will surely contribute to its ability to play in the compliance space: it bought iLumin last fall (for message and e-mail archiving and management), and records management vendor MDY last month. Neither was an especially large investment, particularly when compared to EMC’s layout for security firm RSA or Symantec’s mega-buy of Veritas. Both did however fill in holes in CA’s product portfolio, and both should be able to add immediately to company revenues.
I tend to like the idea of buying what you need – it mirrors what the rest of us do in the real world, even if the numbers may be quite a bit larger than the budgets you and I have to play with.We’ll talk more about what to expect from CA next time.
