* CA has the right ingredients, but will it make the right soup?
My phone began to ring early Thanksgiving week, with the advent of John Swainson as Computer Associates’ new CEO and president. Enterprise Management Associates has been watching CA over the last few years in a number of areas, and so it became a chance to take a second look at the company and where it’s going.
Starting with the obvious, it is clear that Swainson’s background and his ability to be candid under fire bode well for the future of CA. Moreover, CA has not been idle, but instead has been working on new functions and products. Before the “time of troubles” earlier this year, CA had formulated a compelling strategy that involved insights into IT requirements as they evolve, a robust commitment to deliver on an integrated database strategy, a commitment to improve customer relationships along with a still relatively new software lease model, and what EMA perceived as an increasingly open and inquiring culture.
CA already has the ingredients for strong product leadership in areas such as service desk management, integrated mainframe and systems management, and integrated IT financial management and service management.
CA also continues to have significant areas where it must improve – most of which, on some level, it is aware of. It needs to make its products more deployable, better integrated and more adaptive. It must formulate a more complete and consistent analytics strategy, involving better network management and more effective root-cause analysis. And CA will have to continue to drive to make potential strengths real; that is, it should continue to maximize the synergy among storage management, security management and infrastructure management.
All in all, I am inclined to be optimistic about CA’s product future. But there remain significant areas of execution, indicated above, as well as many more challenges too numerous to detail here.
Probably the single most telling factor in whether CA will fulfill its real potential is its ability to revive an active and inquiring culture. This will certainly be something that Swainson can promote. Coming from IBM should be a plus, although I remember plenty of incidents from my own years at IBM when executives felt entitled to make simplistic judgments on whim by virtue of their title and role, much like aristocracy felt entitled to govern based on family fortune and bloodline. And to be fair, analysts are often guilty of the same vice – sadly, more often than not. Progressive decisions and industry insights evolve through open dialog and questioning, including self-questioning and self-assessment.
A second major area to watch is to what degree CA will be willing to abandon the established notion that good product planning means targeting markets for dominance and categorically avoiding areas where, for various reasons, dominance may be unlikely. For instance, it would be a mistake for CA not to invest in network management because becoming a dominant player in that market may seem to be a tough road to hoe. While some selectivity makes sense, the big four vendors – HP, IBM, BMC and of course CA – have all committed to delivering models (e.g. on-demand, adaptive, Business Service Management) that require holistic insight across the infrastructure. And while not every component needs to be a point of leadership, broad domains, such as the network or help desk, become essential informants in any strategic decision-making. For instance, you can’t, in the end, reliably troubleshoot an application service without a strong point of reference in the network and its impact, nor can you optimize the data center realistically if you don’t know how your WAN is behaving.
I would say that if CA can keep an open mind in both of these areas, it will likely bring the many powerful ingredients it has to bear successfully, resulting in greater revenue and brand credibility. But if CA should slide into a more introverted system of leadership, with simplistic approaches to addressing “markets” rather than real user requirements, it may end up as one of those many vendors with great ingredients but a poor main course. Right now, I would vote for optimism here, for CA and CA’s customers – but only time will tell.
