IT services company Computer Associates is cutting 450 jobs worldwide as the result of streamlining within its sales and technical channels.
The Islandia, N.Y. company trimmed the jobs when it formed its new CA Technology Services group, which will combine its pre-sales technical and professional services organizations.
The staff eliminations will occur immediately in North America and will happen over the next several months in other parts of the world, CA said in an announcement Tuesday.
In addition to establishing the new unit, CA is restructuring its channel organization in North America, which it said would “provide more business opportunities to channel partners and to further empower the channel as a primary route-to-market” for its eTrust security software, its BrightStor line of storage area network management software and AllFusion suite of software for data modeling.
The layoffs and sales channel changes announcements arrive as CA labors to pay down its debt, estimated at just over $1 billion, and carve out new sales growth amid a stagnant market for IT services. It also is cooperating with ongoing regulatory probes over how it accounted for some sales during the late 1990s.
CA said its newly realigned reseller field account management team is now focused on building and executing business plans with channel partners. In addition, CA is hiring sales specialists to generate more qualified leads for its channel partners.
The company said the CA Technology Services unit would be headed by Una O’Neill, senior vice president and general manager at CA.
CA has been looking to carve out more market share with products that address with storage software interoperability. Last spring it launched an Enterprise Storage Automation strategy focusing on large-scale storage customers. The effort included sales pitches to IT managers and clients touting expertise about functional intelligence, dynamic storage provisioning and clear policy storage definitions.
Amid stagnant IT sales in the technology industry, storage is considered by experts as a little bright spot, thanks to falling prices on hardware and increasing demands on enterprise systems to distribute data across more environments.
CA’s BrightStor line of enterprise storage products also compete with IBM , EMC
, Veritas
and HP
in the sector.
The company is also trying to resolve ongoing federal regulatory probes over how it accounted for some sales during the late 1990s when over $1 billion of top executives’ bonuses were tied to the company’s ability to hit certain sales targets.
During the late fall, numerous press accounts said prosecutors had widened their investigation into accounting on some deals during 1999 and 2000 that might have involved free software.
