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Computer Associates International Inc. on Tuesday will put the final pieces of its reorganization puzzle together when it launches five separate business units, each with profit and loss responsibility.
The new business units, architected by new CEO John Swainson to bring greater focus to CAs growth opportunities, include Enterprise Systems Management, Security Management, Storage Management, Business Service Optimization and CA Products Group.
The general manager for each unit will be accountable for profit and loss, product development and marketing, staffing, and strategic planning and execution, as well as for customer satisfaction. They will all report to Russ Artzt, who was named executive vice president for all CA products earlier this year.
The goal is to solidify and extend CAs leading position in the enterprise management space. No layoffs are planned as a result of the reorganization, and each unit will begin to report on financial metrics such as revenue generation in the first fiscal quarter of 2006.
One industry watcher briefed on the changes believes they are a logical extension of other changes Swainson has put in place since he was named CEO in November.
“Theyre trying to place focus on Unicenter and eTrust and move decision making down in the organization. These units have to make decisions in order for the business to scale,” said Ray Paquet, vice president and analyst at Gartner Inc. in Lowell, Mass.
Although there is no “short-term impact” on CA customers, the intent is to make CA more responsive to its customers, Swainson said in an interview on Monday.
“None of these are directly customer-facing, but the whole intent is to provide a better alignment from the development team through the service organization. I believe well be able to be more responsive to customer requests and build the kind of products customers want us to build,” he said.
Leading the new Enterprise Systems Management unit will be Alan Nugent, former chief technology officer at Novell Inc. Nugent, who starts at CA on April 8, will be charged with extending CAs lead in the systems and database management arena. Most Unicenter products will fall into this unit.
CA chose Nugent—the only outsider among the new general managers—for his leadership experience, Swainson said. “His combination of being a CIO at a major customer, CTO at a major provider and his seniority had the right balance of things we were looking for,” he said.
Gartners Paquet believes the one surprise among the new business units is the BSO (Business Service Optimization) unit, which will be led by Jacob Lamm, former product development lead for Unicenter.
That new organization, which will include products from the Unicenter ServiceDesk offering as well as Harvest products from CAs AllFusion product line, will see significant investment, Swainson said. “Were augmenting that with some development investments well make and potentially some acquisitions. This is a growth area for us. In the long term this is where we see systems management evolving to. Were going to aggressively invest in growing that part of the business,” he said.
The new BSO unit will focus on business process modeling, IT governance, IT service management and enterprise change management.
Leading the Security Management unit will be Toby Weiss, who was senior vice president for eTrust product management and marketing. His job will be to continue to expand CAs security products while integrating them with CAs overall management software. Hell be most closely focused on identity and access management, threat management and security information management.
Chris Broderick will continue to lead the storage business unit and focus on greater integration of storage management with systems and security management. The CA Products Group, led by Mark Combs, will include products from different CA brands that arent part of the core systems and security management, but are nonetheless important to CA customers and represent significant revenue for CA.
In other news, CA also announced that longtime IBM executive Don Friedman was named to the post of chief marketing officer at CA. Friedman, more recently a managing director at management and marketing consulting company Sound Beach Partners, is charged with bolstering CAs brand.