CA Creates New Business Unit

The unification will result in the layoffs of 450 CA employees, just less than 3 percent of its entire staff, primarily in areas where the integration creates overlap. The new business unit will be run by Una O'Neill, who previously headed the presales group.

George Kafkarkou, CA senior vice president of worldwide channel operations, says the reorganization is designed to help the company and channel partners work together to create increased demand for CA products with a more focused partner management approach for its storage and security solutions.

"Our business model for the North American channel hasn't been appropriate until now; there has been insufficient demand generated to get people to associate security and storage with CA," he says. "We have to increase our lead quality for deals to get fulfilled through the channel, and we haven't been working with our existing customer base to cross-sell and up-sell with our channel partners."

One of the ways CA will facilitate the integration is by developing a portal site for partners and customers. But this endeavor follows very much on the heels of competitors such as Symantec, whose PartnerNet portal has been widely praised by its users and industry observers as one of the primary reasons the company has established and maintained its market position. Kafkarkou says CA's version will be up and running within four weeks, with enhancements to be added between now and the end of the summer. "We're investing heavily in management systems to maximize the benefits to our partners," he says.

The company's hope is that the more streamlined operations, along with coming rebate plans and incentive programs for sales executives, will help the company ratchet up its market share. Under the new program, to ensure cooperation between salespeople and partners, the executive in charge of a sale gets full compensation for any sale generated through a channel partner, and direct salespeople will be evaluated according to their number of transactions and overall revenues, all of which will be pushed along by the new portal technology.

"We haven't had this nationwide cooperative approach until now. We've been almost passive about delivering our storage and security message to the marketplace," Kafkarkou says. "We see opportunities for significant growth, and if you're a partner of CA, there's a chance for you to deliver more incremental revenues. But a good system is the key to facilitating all of this."