CA's Kumar: Wireless Will Spawn New Paradigm

Computer Associates International

"We believe in access to information anytime, anywhere," said Sanjay Kumar, CEO of Computer Associates, an Islandia, N.Y.-based enterprise management software developer, during his keynote speech Tuesday at Comdex Chicago. "We think of mobility as one of the hottest areas in computing in the coming years.

"For 25 years we've been tethered," he added. "When mobile computing takes hold, it will spawn a whole new paradigm in computing."

Kumar pointed to two very different solution providers as examples of partners that are driving that paradigm shift. One is CompuCom Systems, a large veteran integrator that serves Fortune 1000 enterprises, leading verticals and major technology equipment manufacturers. At the other end of the spectrum is Voyage Data, a young and relatively small solution provider that focuses on the health-care market.

CompuCom this week partnered with Sprint to offer service desk mobility solutions, based on CA's Unicenter Service Desk software, for a wide range of mobile devices. The solution covers wireless LANs and WANs, including Sprint's PCS network and a variety of handheld devices. One of the applications, for example, allows technicians to use handheld devices to quickly close service tickets, increase reporting accuracy and improve service-level agreement compliance, Kumar said.

"We believe the strategy to go from centralized computing to pervasive computing is well under way," he said. "The time is ripe for technology like this."

The time is also ripe for the solution being rolled out by Voyage Data, Kumar said. Less than two years old, the Pensacola, Fla.-based company last year won a bid to provide doctors working at Universal Health Services' George Washington University Hospital with a wireless system that allows them to download realtime patient information by a hospital bedside. The solution is based on CA's CleverPath portal product and the new Advantage Wireless Integrator server.

This is Voyage Data's first big wireless job, said Paul Jones, company president. Now that Voyage Data has created the basic application, the company will be able to roll out the solution to other Universal Health Services hospitals and apply it to other health-care facilities, Jones said.

"We're getting to the point where we can create plug-and-play applications and get these products out," he said, adding that one of the most difficult challenges in creating the solution was transforming legacy data into formatted and well-designed data presentations on PDAs. "Advantage Wireless Integrator took care of that."

CA plans to tap its existing solution provider partners and recruit new ones to integrate wireless solutions, Kumar said. CA is aiming the solutions at small- to medium-size enterprises, and medium to large businesses, which utilize low-end and high-end solutions, Kumar said.

"Wireless is new and more complicated," he said in an interview following the keynote. "People don't want to go through the hassle of integration. They don't want to make the same mistakes they made before. So they want get someone who knows what they're doing. I think our partnerships with integrators on the wireless infrastructure will really blossom."

CA does not feel it is necessary to rewrite its entire product set to serve mobile solutions. Instead, the company will re-engineer and refocus some products on the back end that will tie its existing products, mainly BrightStor storage management and eTrust security management software, to mobile solutions, Kumar said.

"It's about ready-made, customized solutions," he said. "That's where the marketplace is going to deliver a fully integrated solution by solution providers."