CA Restructures, Moves To Named Account Model

Fresh into its new fiscal year, big changes are afoot at Computer Associates: The software giant has realigned into five business units and is moving to a named-account model effective today, April 5.

The new business unit structure is much broader than the product units that preceded it. Each of the five new business units will have their own P&Ls with their own management, marketing and development teams, as well as their own support and service organizations. Each unit will also have its own general manager. The goal is to make the individual product groups more accountable and responsive to market and customer needs.

"This is truly a major effort for CA, and will give us the kind of accountability necessary to drive leadership across the company and growth for the long term," said John Swainson, CA's CEO, in a statement.

The five units are:

• enterprise systems management, which will be headed by Alan Nugent, the former CTO of Novell who will join CA this Friday;
• security management, to be headed by Toby Weiss, formerly senior vice president for CA's eTrust product management and marketing;
• storage management, headed by CA exec Chris Broderick;
• business service optimization, to be run by Jacob Lamm, former product development lead for Unicenter; and
• the CA Products Group, which will comprise a variety of products in the security and systems management segments, and be headed by longtime CA development executive Mark Combs.
• Longtime CTO Yogesh Gupta will continue in his role as CA's senior vice president and chief technology officer, and will continue to ensure a common technology architecture and development standards across the business units. He will also oversee emerging technologies, including mobility, RFID and pervasive computing.
• Todd O'Bert, president of Productive Corp., a CA partner based in Minneapolis, says he is hopeful that the moves will lead to more products that are focused on customer requirements.
• "CA has an enormous wealth of technology knowledge and intellectual property under its name," O'Bert says. "Hopefully the guys on the security and storage side can harness it more effectively."
• Swainson also suggested the company will move away from offering commodity products in the storage segment.
• "While storage remains a critical component of our technology offerings, we need to recognize that its entire sector is being commoditized," he said in a letter to stakeholders today. "CA's true competitive advantage in storage will be to tie it more closely to our core systems and security management business, so that customers can manage storage as part of the enterprise."
• Indeed, CA's key focus will be in dominating systems management and security. In his letter to stakeholders, Swainson defined growing the company's reach through partners as one of six key priorities for the new fiscal year.
• "CA must do a better job of working with partners to expand into new markets and better serve our customers' diverse and expanding needs," Swainson said.
• As part of that effort, Swainson pointed to the company's new named-account model, which takes effect today. The company has earmarked 12,278 such named accounts that it plans to call on directly, but the program will also include incentives to CA's sales force for driving sales through the channel.
• The goal of the new program is to "unite our direct sales organization with our partner network to better serve new and existing customers," according to a letter to partners today, adding that even named accounts will not be exclusive to CA. "Instead, you will be encouraged to work with our direct sales force to serve and support named accounts based on your own specific value-adds."
• During a meeting with company officials at CA's Islandia, N.Y.-based headquarters, executives said moving to a named-account model is pivotal to CA as it seeks to either get into or expand accounts where it clearly can't provide an entire solution.
• "If you look at our coverage model, I can't sell you a complete SAN environment that includes EMC disk arrays, Brocade switches and some Brightstor [data-protection] software," said Gary Quinn, CA's executive vice president of partner advocacy. "We're not an IGS or an EDS. We have to build that capability through a network of partners."
• The named companies fall into accounts with revenues ranging from $300 million and up, though CA hasn't categorically slotted out all companies in the upper echelon. Nonetheless, the company has carved out most of the larger enterprises. Still, CA officials emphasized that partners are not shut out of any of the named accounts.
• Insisting it will need partners to grow, even in such named accounts, George Fischer, CA's senior vice president of sales, now oversees the company's telesales organization with oversight of fielding opportunities to both the company's direct sales force and to partners.
• "There are thousands of companies out there that provide opportunities for us and our partners, and we are just scratching the surface with them," Fischer said.
• CA officials say they intend to continue efforts to eliminate channel conflict and encourage cooperation between channel partners and the company's direct sales force. So far, the company has made significant progress toward that end, says Tony Ferrigno, CTO and vice president of business development at Ciber, a CA partner.
• "I've definitely seen the direct people engaging us more -- there's no question," Ferrigno says. "They're finding opportunities, they're reaching out to us for help. I think they are finally realizing that we [are not a threat]."
• Ferrigno says that CA's efforts to assign channel advocacy management teams throughout eight North American regions has made a marked difference as well.
• "They help us navigate through the CA labyrinth as needed," he says. "They've brought opportunities to us because they work directly with the direct salespeople as well."