EITM is to CA, what On Demand is to IBM
I’ll be publishing a fuller report on CA’s reinvigoration next week, but in the meantime I wanted to share this observation as I think it says a lot about what John Swainson is doing at CA, and in general, the value of a good idea.
The parallel between EITM and IBM’s "
On Demand" vision and strategy comes from the fact that CA’s EITM vision, like On Demand has been for IBM, is as much about rallying the troops internally around a core idea and driving synergies between different capabilities, as it is about telling a new story to customers and prospects. Having
reorganised CA to a business unit based structure that aligns product development to sales and marketing in CA’s strategic lines of business (enterprise & systems management, security management, storage management and business service optimisation) EITM is a way to now make sure that the whole CA proposition is greater than the sum of its parts.
The power of the "rally the company around something that customers can buy into, which will also help us to get things working better internally" idea, which has already brought IBM a heap of benefits, is just one reason why I think the majority of analysts and journalists are coming away from CA World with positive jottings in their notebooks.
Of course CA has "cried wolf" about product integration before (
here's a report of one example), and this time the scope of its ambition is an order of magnitude bigger - so now the focus has to be proof, proof, proof.
