BOSTON — John Swainson, the new chief of Computer Associates , renewed the company’s
commitment to open standards and said more CA products could enter the open
source community.
Speaking here at the LinuxWorld trade show today, Swainson said he’s pleased
with the open-sourcing of CA’s Ingres Relational
Database and other smaller interface tools.
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John Swainson Source: CA |
Last year, the Islandia, N.Y., company released Ingres under its own CA
Trusted Open Source License (CA-TOSL), a variation of the common public
license from opensource.org.
Software vendors can incorporate Ingres into their products as long as the
Ingres source code is provided with it. CA will charge for support and
indemnification as added-cost options to the CA-TOSL Ingres.
Swainson also said IT vendors must cooperate more on open standards to spur
innovation and reduce complexity for enterprise customers. He cited CA’s
work with Cisco , HP
and IBM
on the Web Services Common Information Model (WS-CIM) standard as an
example.
“Open standards are essential to the growth of our industry,” Swainson said.
“They allow us to innovate separately and glue [our innovations] together.”
Swainson cited on-demand computing as another area that could benefit from a
more coordinated approach from leading IT vendors.
Swainson, who spent 26 years at IBM, including a stint as head of its
middleware division, expects a “fairly close relationship” with his former
employer, although he conceded that “not everyone there is in love with me
anymore.”
“I anticipate we’ll cooperate with IBM because we have a shared purpose,” he
said.
Swainson also reiterated that CA is looking to grow by acquiring attractive
technologies, pointing out that the company has “not been shy” about making
strategic buys in the past. He did not, however, identify specific areas of
interest.
