* CA reorganizes into five business units
Today, we’ll cough up some odds and ends that have been accumulating over the past few weeks.
Before leaving the story of Oracle’s acquisition of Oblix (subject of last week’s two newsletters), I received a couple of notes from people suggesting that my characterization of Gordon Eubanks as “one of the nicest gentlemen in high tech,” may not be accurate. According to these notes, the deal for Oblix netted Eubanks a few extra millions while stock holding and stock-option holding employees got virtually nothing. I couldn’t corroborate the actual numbers being bandied about because the details of the deal weren’t made public by either side, but perhaps Eubanks and Oracle’s Larry Ellison (nickname: “the pirate of Silicon Valley”) have more in common than I thought.
Computer Associates has reorganized itself into five business units under new president and CEO John Swainson, hired to try to regain good press for the company in the wake of the well-publicized departure of former Chairman and CEO Sanjay Kumar, who resigned in the midst of a multibillion-dollar accounting scandal. One surprise in the reorg is that former Novell CTO Alan Nugent, who abruptly left the networking and identity vendor just days before its annual users and partners meeting last month, will head CA’s flagship products, the Unicenter management applications. Identity products will be in a new security offerings group headed by Toby Weiss, former senior vice president for CA’s eTrust product management marketing. That’s a good sign for the identity management team at CA where good news hasn’t been all that abundant recently.
Single sign-on, both of the enterprise and Web-based varieties, has been getting a lot of play recently. It’s just been announced that at next month’s Digital ID World conference in San Francisco (https://www.digitalidworld.com/conference/2005/) I’ll be heading up a panel discussion on Enterprise Single Sign-on with panelists from the major single sign-on providers: Passlogix, RSA, Imprivata and BNX. This was a discussion I’d planned on doing at last year’s event but scheduling problems with some of the panelists wiped out that session. We did have an interesting panel last year that talked about “Differentiating Identity Management Solutions,” and I expect this year’s discussion to be at least as much fun while still being enlightening.
There’s another event taking place in conjunction with next month’s Digital ID World that I’d like to mention, and it’s a freebie. C’mon back next issue and find out all about it.
