It's only the start for the 'new' CA
My fellow analyst James Governor has done a great job
of summarising the recent CA industry analyst symposium. The candour of the senior management team was indeed refreshing and the team in Islandia has clearly undertaken an honest appraisal of the ‘old’ CA. With 75% of revenue from 1000 large enterprise customers and 90% of it through direct sales, more than half of which is from the US (in contrast to the vast majority of its peers which generate two-thirds of their revenue outside the US), the company is going to have to do some significant rebalancing of its customer profile. With the mainframe market growing at low single digit rates, at least as far as CA’s opportunity is concerned, it is also going to have to shift the 50:50 ratio of mainframe to distributed system sales in favour of the latter. The recent reorganisation into
five business units, coupled with an increased emphasis on partners and changes to the structure and compensation schemes of the sales organisation, are certainly moves in the right direction.
The company has also recognised the importance of outlining a clear product strategy, in the face of the likes of On-Demand/Autonomic Computing from IBM and Adaptive Enterprise from HP. Its response is Enterprise IT Management (EIM). The ‘I’ of EIM originally referred to infrastructure. The shift to IT appears to be a response to the ‘running IT as a business’ mantra which permeates the propositions of the likes of BMC, HP, IBM and Mercury. The acquisition of Niku increases the credibility of this change, bringing as it does project/portfolio management and governance capabilities. To help customers understand where they are and how CA can help them get to where they want to be, the company – like its competitors – has defined a maturity model (derived in part from work done by Carnegie Mellon University), designed to help customers move from Active through intermediate Efficient and Responsive stages to the ultimate goal of Business-driven IT management. Although designed to help customers, the plethora of different maturity models introduces its own set of challenges when it comes to comparing the different vendors.
EIM is built on a core set of ‘Foundation Services’, including a Management Database (MDB, with more than 6000 entities!), workflow engine for IT process automation and a portal and visualisation tools to provide a common user interface. Three pillars of Security, System and Storage management are built on this foundation, with Business Service Optimization (BSO) along the top spanning the three pillars. As well as technology, EIM incorporates automated IT management processes – referred to as IT Flows – based on a combination of ITIL, COBIT and CA’s own best practices. IT Flows enable CA and its partners to assess where customers are on the maturity model and to identify the investment, potential ROI and products required to transition through the different stages, based on CA’s ‘Value Path’ methodology (aspects of which have been patented).
There is much that is praiseworthy in EIM. It fits well with the new business unit organisation and IT Flows and Value Path will be valuable assets in the sales cycle, as well as opening up opportunities for the channel. At the same time, it emphasises the importance of aligning investment in and delivery of managed IT services with business process priorities. But this latter point also highlights one of the challenges for CA. There is still a lack of clarity when it comes to what CA means by an IT service and it varies depending on which business unit you are talking to – it’s an email service, a business function, an IT lifecycle process … In fact, as we describe in
SOA: Handle with care, our view is that all of these definitions are correct but CA must ensure that it delivers a consistent message irrespective of which part of CA a customer is talking to. CA must address this quickly but it faces some more significant challenges.
The re-engineering of its products to exploit the Foundation Services is a significant task. Whilst it has made good progress in exploiting the MDB across its product portfolio and the next release of Unicenter (r11) promises to provide usability and interoperability enhancements, there is still a long way to go. At the same time (referring back to the 50:50 split between mainframe and distributed system revenues), if you look in more detail at the plethora of products which underpin EIM, it becomes clear that the capabilities they deliver are not evenly spread across both environments. Targeted acquisitions, such as that of Concord and Niku, remain an important aspect of CA’s growth strategy and the company will no doubt be investing to address this.
So, all in all, John Swainson et al have made a great start in re-invigorating CA but it remains just that – a start.
