CA's Turmoil Continues As iCanSP Head Resigns

The news came a day after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission issued CA a "Wells notice," a procedural letter that informed the company of potential legal action related to questionable accounting practices during fiscal year 2000.

Li, a 24-year CA veteran, had been quoted in published reports as saying that CA not only ignored but also competed with the iCanSP subsidiary. She even reportedly offered to purchase CA's 90 percent stake in the start-up, but CA refused.

Several iCanSP managers also resigned, according to an iCanSP spokesman.

After the resignations, Li was asked to turn in her ID badge, corporate credit card and keys and was escorted from CA's Islandia, N.Y., headquarters, according to an article in Wednesday's edition of Newsday.

CA declined to comment on the resignation, but the Newsday story quoted Li as saying, "I just don't think this is the way you respect people, walking someone out who dedicated more than 20 years to a company."

With Li's departure, all connections between the Wang family and CA are gone. Wang retired from the company in 2002 and received a controversial $1.1 billion bonus in 1998, a move that raised the ire of CA shareholders. Since then, as federal probes into CA's accounting practices have persisted, rumors have swirled about a high-tension rift between Wang and his onetime protege, current Chairman and CEO Sanjay Kumar.

Just last month, iCanSP announced the availability of its iCan Service Management Suite, aimed at corporate IT organizations functioning as internal managed service providers. At the time, Li hailed the product as a major service management tool and said the company planned a channel program later this year.

On Wednesday, the spokesman declined to comment how Li's resignation might impact those channel plans, or CA's plans for the managed services business overall. He also declined to comment on iCanSP's plans to hire or name a successor, except to say that the responsibilities had been "reassigned."

Some of CA's channel partners said they were "concerned" that the company's nascent managed services effort appears to be in jeopardy. Joe Young, president of Global Data Systems in Hingham, Mass., said that while Li's departure doesn't necessarily indicate anything in particular, it certainly doesn't bode well for the future of managed services at CA.

"Initially, CA was committed to the channel for its growth of managed services, and that didn't work out the way they hoped," Young says, referring to sagging sales on the company's Unicenter product. "Now they have a subsidiary that is a managed services provider -- it makes you wonder."