Amid Turmoil, Computer Associates Moves Ahead

Staying focused as the dust continues to swirl around the corner office, CA executives insist the company will remain focused on its mission to become the dominant player in the ever-consolidating IT infrastructure management market.

According to CA CTO Yogesh Gupta in a recent interview with eWEEK, infrastructure management is moving toward greater integration of tasks, much the same way the database market shifted 10 years ago or the enterprise resource planning market did five years ago.

"Thirty companies may be bought out," Gupta said. "The rest will go away. We see growth coming from integration—you have to have most of the pieces [to survive]."

Toward that end, CA is working to pare down its new releases from the "hundreds and hundreds" of products it now sells, said Gupta, so that release numbers will be synchronized and "all the pieces at a given releases level will work together."

Gupta added that CAs goal for this year is to whittle down the number of new releases to about a dozen. BrightStor 11, released in January, is the first example of that effort. It combines some 60 products that are integrated and tested together.

Real integration, however, comes when all tools leverage a common discovery mechanism and work from a common repository of asset data. "We will create a single [asset] repository, populate it with our products and make it open for anyone that wants to integrate with it," Gupta said. "In the next three to six months, well define it, and in the next 18 months, our products will integrate with it."

Timeline of Turmoil October 8 CA fires CFO Ira Zar and executives David Kaplan and David Rivard after internal investigation determines CA prematurely recognized revenue in fiscal 2000 January 12 CA receives notice of pending civil proceeding from SEC January 22 Finance Senior Vice President Lloyd Silverstein pleads guilty to obstruction of justice March 11 Moodys Investors Service downgrades CAs debt rating April 1 CA appoints former HP exec Jeff Clarke as CFO; names Executive Vice President Gary Quinn to lead partners effort; consolidates global sales organization April 2 CA discloses stock grant to Sanjay Kumar valued at almost $8 million April 8 Zar, Rivard and Kaplan plead guilty to securities fraud; CA fires Chief Counsel Steven Woghin Pending CA wraps up internal accounting probe

"Weve had multiple conversations with CA about that," said Cindy Luman, chief operating officer at e-business consulting company PPT Solutions Inc., in Jacksonville, Fla., and a longtime CA customer. "Were interested in having a holistic view of the infrastructure [and] understanding whats on it, what are the vulnerabilities, whats it doing and where do I get help."

CA at the same time will use its much-hyped Sonar technology, acquired last summer, to provide the dynamic discovery mechanism required to keep asset repositories current and report asset usage. "In the next three to six months, you will see from CA dynamic business process views. Were working to keep this current and automatic," said Gupta.

"You can automatically look at a complex business infrastructure, find the application components, correlate them and map them to a business process," said Mark Barrenechea, senior vice president of product development, who joined CA from Oracle Corp. last year.

CA has identified seven products that will use the Sonar technology over the next 18 months. Today, only eTrust Network Forensics and Change Impact Analyzer, an embedded feature within Unicenter ServicePlus Service Desk, incorporate Sonar. But CA is testing a new release of Unicenter Network and Systems Management that contains Smart Business Process Views, based on Sonar. It will be available by midyear.

Gupta would not disclose the other Sonar-based products in the works, except to say the company is also working on common user interfaces to facilitate product integration.

Next page: Integration at the heart of security efforts.