Computer Associates interim CEO Kenneth Cron told customers the company is focusing on the future and backed it up by unwrapping new software and services to better manage IT processes.
“As you know, we’ve had some challenges recently,” Cron said in a keynote speech to launch caworld in Las Vegas Sunday. “I want you to understand CA is a company with huge strengths — financial strength, technology strength, strength in people and products. CA’s strong and we’re ready to move ahead. I’ve committed CA to the highest standards of fiscal discipline and integrity.”
Cron’s words launched the 10th anniversary of the Islandia, N.Y., software management company’s convention, caworld, at a time when other news about the company has trumped all other announcements. For example, a federal investigation by the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) over questionable accounting practices has now led to financial restatements.
Close to 10,000 attendees are expected during the show this week. A packed house sat while Cron, the newly-minted executive, spoke about the thorny issues surrounding CA’s business practices. But they also got an earful of how customers into CA’s future.
While the company’s executives wait for word on the findings of the SEC
investigation, which Cron expects soon, CA has been busy tweaking its software for what the interim CEO calls the “Age of Management Software.”
Called Enterprise Infrastructure Management (EIM), CA’s new integration
strategy aims to consolidate end user, business and data processes under one
umbrella regardless of vendor platform. EIM’s goal: to make the IT
department just another function of the business, with more visibility for
concerted decision-making processes and run like just any other group within
the enterprise.
“Companies used to purchase accounts payable, general ledger, order entry
and procurement from different technology providers,” Mark Barrenechea, CA
senior vice president of product development, said in a statement. “This
does not happen today. Companies have learned that an integrated approach
mitigates the high costs of manually integrating disparate applications.
Management software is evolving in the same way.”
Two new programs were announced Sunday to solidify CA’s EIM strategy,
Unicenter Service Management and CA Management Bundle for Microsoft
Exchange. Both give customers a “top-down” view of the corporate network
and the activities underway, warning of potential or actual problems and
improving integration efforts.
The new Unicenter offering automates service delivery and financial
administration overview for executives. Using dashboards and service
delivery catalogs, CIOs and other executives can monitor changes in network
performance, measured against pre-determined service level agreements (SLA)
between the company and customers or the cost to deliver IT services to the
customer.
For its CA Management Bundle for Microsoft Exchange, the company tapped its
own experiences with the server technology to deliver improvements, said
Yogesh Gupta, CTO, at Monday’s caworld keynote speech.
With nearly 100 Exchange Servers running its email and IT infrastructure
worldwide, Gupta said he’s aware of the challenges of running the software:
servers grinding to a halt when it runs out of storage space, monitoring
software updates and patches and watching for and eliminating spam and
viruses.
“Try doing a hundred different management functions across a hundred
different boxes, and that’s just a nightmare,” he told caworld attendees.
“We recognize the need here for folks like yourselves, looking at our own
environment, and came up with a brand new solution, a complete management
solution just for Exchange.
The Microsoft Exchange bundle lets managers look at all the Microsoft
servers on the network (whether they use the Management Bundle or not) and
see how they are performing. Using a combination of Unicenter, eTrust
(virus checker) and BrightStor (server recovery) software tools, CA
customers on an Exchange 5.5/2000/2003 network are able to automate many of
the back-end security functions that would normally require time- and
resource-intensive monitoring.
Just last month CA restated
$2.2 billion in past financial reports, ousted
former chairman and CEO Sanjay Kumar, fired nine financial and legal
department managers, and installed Cron as interim CEO until it could find a
permanent replacement. Three former financial executives have
recently pled guilty to federal charges over the financial scandal.
