Computer Associates Parts Ways With Milford

The Islandia, NY-based management vendor expects to name his replacement next week, a company spokesperson said.

In April, CA promoted Milford from head of its channel storage business to senior vice president and general manager of North American channels. At the same time, the company launched a channel-preferred sales model in its storage unit, a plan led by Milford that compensates its direct sales force more for sales that go through channel partners than for sales sold directly.

CA has pledged to move the new model to other business units, such as it's ETrust security and AllFusion Erwin data modeling lines, but has yet to do so. That wasn't happening as quickly as CA would like, the spokesperson said.

"A decision was made mutually and amicably between both Mark and CA that I guess it was time to move on and have a new, fresh face coming in and pushing that forward," she said.

The decision was reached this week and was effective immediately. In addition, Joe Pirozzi, vice president for the storage channel business unit, also has left the company, the spokesperson said. Both Milford and Pirozzi joined CA from Hewlett-Packard.

Milford was not immediately available for comment.

"It's their loss," said Todd Huntley, president of Sanserve, a storage solution provider based in Roseville, Minn. "Based on what I've seen, they've done everything they needed to do to keep us interested while the business has developed substance. Now we're getting substance," Huntley said.

The channel-preferred sales model was developed as part of the war CA has been waging war for market share in the storage management space against Veritas Software, a well-entrenched opponent.

However, not all solution providers have seen the fruits of CA's strategy.

"There was the big channel announcement [in April when they said we would be working real close with the direct sales force, and I just haven't seen that happen in storage or security," said Dale Aychman, director of business development at Stirling Systems Group, a solution provider based in Boulder, Colo.