CA Announces New Brand Unit Structure

Speaking during a press conference at CA World here, Kumar said the new brand units will have product development, customer support, and marketing and brand management responsibility. The brand units will not have direct responsibility for sales and channel strategy, said Kumar.

The five brand units are:enterprise management (Unicenter), security (eTrust), storage (BrightStor), portal/business intelligence and application lifecycle management (CleverPath, AllFusion) , and mainframe (Advantage).

The brand unit structure coincides with the creation of a new single channel organization. As previously reported by CRN, the new channel organization will be headed by Mark Milford, currently senior vice president and general manager of storage management products.

"What is not changing in our company with this new organization structure is really how we interact with our customers," he said. "Our commitment to customers is to maintain a uniform sales organization." Kumar said there has been "95 percent continuity" over the last year in the sales teams that interact with customers.

Kumar said the channel strategy will be dictated by Milford in conjunction with the company's top two sales executives: Executive Vice President of Sales Stephen Richards and Executive Vice President Gary Quinn, who runs CA's Client Relations Organization.

CA has also created a new "customer advocate" function with a number of senior executives responsible for relationships with large companies across specific vertical industry segments.

Separately, when questioned about the Securities and Exchange Commission's inquiry into CA's accounting practices, Kumar said he remains "very confident" that the company's accounting is proper. "We have a very conservative, transparent business model," he said. "I believe that time is the only factor that will tell when this inquiry is closed."