CA Divides Into Five Separate Business Units

Solution providers said the latest moves, combined with a new named-accounts partner model, open the door for strong sales gains as CA sharpens its systems, network and security management focuses.

Todd O'Bert, president of Productive, a security solution provider in Minneapolis, said he expects his CA sales to double this year to $2 million as a result of the named-accounts model and changes taking hold under new CA CEO John Swainson. "Swainson is getting rolling, and we're just starting to see the impact," said O'Bert, a member of CA's Enterprise Partner Advisory Council. "[CA's] guys are moving in lockstep with partners."

Swainson last week made his biggest changes since taking the helm four months ago, restructuring CA into five business units—Enterprise Systems Management, Security Management, Storage Management, Business Service Optimization and the CA Products Group—each with complete profit-and-loss responsibility.

In an open letter to CA shareholders last week, Swainson said leveraging partners to expand CA's reach will be one of six key priorities over the next year. "Currently, indirect sales make up less than 10 percent of CA's overall revenue while the industry average is 51 percent," he wrote. "We see great opportunity to grow in this area, and we need to make it attractive for partners to do business with us."

Moreover, Swainson moved to acquire Concord for $330 million in an all-cash deal under which CA also will assume $20 million in net debt. CA intends to integrate the Concord technology with its Unicenter network management line and will sell the Concord products through its channel partners.

"Concord has a phenomenal tool for monitoring and managing data that comes off of devices," said Tony Ferrigno, CTO and vice president of business development at CIBER, a CA enterprise partner and a Concord partner in Greenwood, Colo.

Ferrigno expects his CA sales to double this year in large part due to the new named-accounts model, which calls for the CA sales force to work with partners in 12,278 named accounts, with the rest served exclusively by partners. That said, some partners are awaiting further details on what some see as a high number of named accounts under CA's new model.

Bob Roddewig, sales manager at ProSys Information Systems, a CA Advisory Council member in Norcross, Ga., said he remains "suspicious" of the named-accounts model. "The whole thing is vague. Does this means we don't do renewals for accounts?"

ProSys lost "the best [CA] partner rep we ever had" a month ago, Roddewig said, who now deals with a freshman CA representative less able to help him understand the meaning of CA's actions.

STEVEN BURKE contributed to this story.