CA: It's Your Relationship

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CA expanded its portfolio of software products sold exclusively through the channel, debuting in recent weeks an on-demand business-continuity and disaster-recovery service, a data-profiling tool and other IT management applications.

The new products are significant for two reasons: They mark a major expansion of CA's Software-as-a-Service offerings, and they broaden the lineup of products the Islandia, N.Y.-based vendor is relying on solution providers to sell.

CA still generates a big chunk of its sales through its aggressive sales force, and solution providers have at times raised questions about the vendor's channel commitment. But at the CA World 2008 user and channel partner conference in November, Bill Lipsin, senior vice president of worldwide channels, told some 600 solution providers that the company is counting on its channel partners to sell CA products in such areas as recovery management, Internet security and voice/network management.

CA also made it clear that it wants channel partners selling the new products to take the lead in managing relationships with customers. That's a marked difference from some vendors, particularly many SaaS suppliers, which maintain control of the customer relationship. "We do not get in the way of the customer-partner relationship," Lipsin said in an interview after the keynote.

Perhaps the most significant new product is the CA Instant Recovery On Demand service targeted at small and midsize businesses with 100 to 1,000 employees, said Adam Famularo, senior vice president and general manager of CA's recovery management and data modeling business unit. While most large organizations have backup and recovery systems in place, they are less common among SMBs, given the systems' cost and complexity.

The service is based on CA's XOsoft High Availability backup and recovery software. Toronto-based Geminare Inc. is providing the hosting service. The service replicates a company's business applications and data and provides automatic failover and recovery in the event of system failure. The system, for example, can be used to provide realtime replication for Oracle software, BlackBerry Enterprise Server and Microsoft Windows Server, Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server and Internet Information Server (IIS).

CA's pitch to channel partners and customers is that the turnkey Instant Recovery On Demand service can be implemented in 24 hours or less. CA channel partners working with the new backup and recovery service will handle all implementation chores, hold the contract with the customer and manage the billing for the service.

"We're expecting that channel partners will keep the relationship with the customer," Famularo said. "They need to own that relationship."