Ex-Novell CTO Alan Nugent last week officially joined Computer Associates as senior vice president and general manager of the company’s newly designated Enterprise Systems Management unit, home to CA’s Unicenter network and systems management software. Nugent recently spoke with Network World Senior Editor Denise Dubie.
Ex-Novell CTO Alan Nugent last week officially joined Computer Associates as senior vice president and general manager of the company’s newly designated Enterprise Systems Management unit, home to CA’s Unicenter network and systems management software. Nugent’s arrival coincided with President and CEO John Swainson’s announcement of a company reorganization and refocused business strategy (see “CA chief details company plans). Nugent recently spoke with Network World Senior Editor Denise Dubie.
What is your mission?
My responsibility at Novell was to think about upcoming strategic technology changes in the market landscape. Conversations with CA have gravitated toward a similar role that would bring a combination of business leadership and technology insight to the company. Specifically, my goal going forward is to grow the business. We [Nugent reports to Russ Artzt, CA’s executive vice president for products] haven’t talked about hard targets yet.
I am a big believer in the Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm. I’m going to come in, do some assessments across the board, meet with people like [Artzt] and other senior leaders in the company to get their input and understand their aspirations, and then work with my team to grow the business. I am being tasked to make sure there is little or no attrition from the customer base and that we are growing the base in new areas.
What do you bring from Novell that you see as most applicable to CA?
One of the things I faced when I walked into Novell was a huge amount of products and product complexity. The company had products that, for example, used five or six different management consoles. The code bases were not clean or common across platforms. My job there was to rationalize all that and put a strategic umbrella in place. The job insinuated adding some software engineering discipline and rigor into the company. I consider a lot of it blocking and tackling from a development and leadership point of view.
Some of that blocking and tackling needs to be put in place at CA. I suspect there may be some best practices inside the company today that just aren’t widely shared. CA is the same model philosophically as the Novell model was. It’s just on a different scale. This is a much larger company with a broader product line so we really need to be a little bit more analytical and rigorous in terms of how we go about this product rationalization.
What is your knowledge and experience with Unicenter at this point?
My experience with Unicenter goes back a long way, back to the beginning of the TNG product. I was the CTO at Xerox, and we selected Unicenter. We were one of the early customers who picked that over Tivoli. I still think that architecturally Unicenter is the right way to do management from a framework perspective. The product has evolved over the years in terms of its breadth of coverage, not only in platforms but in terms of kinds of services that you are able to manage from the various parts of the technology.
How do you see the management software evolving further under your direction?
I don’t think it’s fair to exclude any emerging technology as one that should be investigated. There are a lot of interesting intersections occurring. Specifically of interest to me is the notion of a composite digital identity that is representative not only of users with their access rights and privileges but [the rights and privileges of devices, as well].
When I think about CA’s products on the identity management side – in the eTrust family and Unicenter – I believe there are interesting things we can do down the road technologically that might make it easier for customers to manage everything in their enterprise, as opposed to using different tools to manage each user, device, application, call center or service.
CA recently acquired technology to broaden its identity management portfolio. Where does the company still need work?
The company has a strong business built around its eTrust family, and the Netegrity acquisition was clearly direction-setting for the market. CA has a lot of the core technologies or foundational technologies that will extend the notion of identity already existing in its product portfolio. It’s more of a case of knitting them together a little differently. There might be some more things we need to do in terms of development or partnership. These things are going to happen because the market is going to demand it more and more.
About two years ago now, CA announced its vision of on-demand computing, the notion of its management software underpinning automation and intelligent IT service delivery. Will you continue to develop products around that vision?
I am a big fan of that. The notion of being able to provision elements of the application portfolio or the infrastructure based on the identity and demands of the application or the user is absolutely a key emerging technology that customers are going to want.
I don’t see a whole lot of them standing up on the desk and screaming for it today. But there are other technologies that are going to create these kinds of opportunities. For example, as virtualization begins to find its way into platforms other than mainframes, that will create interesting opportunities for management software. What one might be able to do then will be able to provision into a virtualized environment, and that needs to obviously be managed and done differently than management is done today.
What are some areas that CA may back off of with its Unicenter brand?
I can’t respond to that in terms of Unicenter specifically, right now. The important thing to understand is to take our cues from the customers and then balance that with where the market is going. I need to find out why there are big chunks of customers out there that don’t consider Unicenter when they look for management tools. I need to make sure we continue to respond to existing customers but also invest in areas where we can broaden the appeal of the products. That is somethingI need to get hip-deep in at CA, and then I can better address the question.
