CA Taps Nugent As New CTO

For Nugent, the new role as CTO will provide him the opportunity to further define and help extend to customers the Enterprise IT Management vision that CA introduced a year.

"A big part of my job will be to continue to provide the technology guidance that strengthens our product portfolio as it relates to EITM," Nugent says. "In the short term, I don't see there is any need or desire for any directional shifts [EITM] is catching on strong with customers, especially the larger ones."

Nugent has served as director of CA's Enterprise Systems Management business unit for the past 16 months and will continue to head that organization until a successor is named. CA is currently engaged in an internal and external search for a new leader for that unit.

Replacing Barrenechea will be significant task for Nugent. A long-term CA employee, Barrenechea announced in May he would join technology investment firm Garnett and Helfrich Capital as a director beginning June 19.

CA has also seen a number of other recent executive defections. CFO Robert Davis and COO Jeff Clarke have also left the company.

Nugent says he will establish his own identity as CTO of CA.

"If you look across the industry there are two types of CTOs," he says. "There are the ones that spend a lot of time in the pulpit talking about how great things are going to be, and then there are those that are focused on trying to deliver value to the company they represent and to the customers that are relying on that technology. I am clearly the later of those two."

Customers are buying management software because they have "big labor pools" they want to manage with platforms that are "sustainable, repeatable, and predictable," Nugent says. "The evolution of our products has to be focused on helping customers automate and have higher levels of control in terms of managing their infrastructure and applications and the business process."

While Nugent acknowledges he will have an "evangelical" role in spreading the word about EITM, he says a bigger part of his job will be in overseeing the development and evolution of an integrated platform, specifically within the company's current and future generations of products, including Unicenter r11, the r8 security products, and 11.5 storage products.

"Having run a large business unit at CA I can have a much more practical view on what the technology office ought to be providing," Nugent says. "I also have the advantage of having been a CTO in a number of large organizations."

Prior to joining CA Nugent was VP and CTO at Novell. He has also served as chief technologist and chief software architect at BellSouth, and as senior VP, CTO, and CIO at American Re Insurance.