Hoping the public will forgive its past financial shenanigans, CA embarked
on the next leg of its comeback journey with an emboldened management
software strategy and a re-branding and advertising push it calls “Believe
Again.”
Believe Again is CA’s bid to show the public that it has fully recovered
from crushing accounting improprieties that hindered the Islandia, N.Y.,
company’s momentum and growth. With the push, the “Computer Associates”
moniker was formally dropped in favor of “CA” to signal the change.
CEO John Swainson outlined his company’s new vision for information
technology management, Enterprise Information Technology Management (EITM),
at CA World in Las Vegas Sunday evening.
“CA is a changed company,” Swainson said in a press conference. “But it is
not an entirely new company. We’ve taken the strengths of the past and
combined them with new initiatives, strategies and ideas to ensure that CA
is the clear industry leader in meeting the evolving information technology
needs of customers.”
The recent past is something CA has been trying to escape and Swainson was
brought
in from rival IBM to help do just that.
CA also earlier this year reorganized to operate better after having to restate earnings several times and watch a CEO be reckoned with by the SEC.
EITM is CA’s vision for more modular infrastructure management, and it
includes a raft of 26 new software offerings to manage computer
infrastructure. This includes Unicenter R11, the vendor’s latest suite of
tools for managing configuration, applications, databases, networks and
mainframes.
On Monday, CA introduced a service availability solution to help customers
improve service, minimize downtime and reduce the cost of owning their
service-oriented infrastructures (SOA)
As with previous announcements from IBM and BEA Systems, the service availability software is designed to better integrate and manage information locked in vertical silos.
The product offers a programmable API to make it easier for customers to
bundle third-party management solutions, and supports virtualization for
resource allocation across Linux, Unix and Windows platforms. It also
catalogs IT assets by adding them to a management database.
The solution also offers event correlation to isolate root causes from
multiple related events and policy-based notifications to send alerts via
instant messages, e-mail, text messages, phones or wireless devices.
Some analysts applauded the move.
SG Cowen analyst Drew Brosseau said EITM uses the breadth of CA’s product
line to provide an integrated, simplified suite of IT management software
focused on systems, security and storage management.
“The meeting marks an important milestone in the turnaround at CA, with the
official launch of its EITM product line and the
re-branding of the company by the new management team,” Brosseau said in a
research note.
“These moves, along with expanding distribution and some M&A, should drive
further acceleration in billings and cash flow growth and support another 20
percent-plus upside in the stock relative to the market over the next year.”
Meanwhile, Believe Again will be articulated through a global print
advertising campaign, Web site redesigns, online marketing, collateral and
signage. For example, the “C” and the “A” have been brought closer together
in the company’s official logo.
