Can You Trust The New CA?
It hasn’t been a pretty week for CA Inc. (formerly Computer Associates International), but don’t let recent news deter your commitment to CA’s channel strategy.
Sure, former CA CEO Sanjay Kumar pleaded guilty to securities fraud on Monday. And within 24 hours of that news, CA issued a preliminary earnings warning for its Q4 ended March 31. The two events, however, are completely unrelated. CA cut ties with Kumar in 2004, swapping out its senior management team to appease government investigators who were probing CA’s accounting practices at the time.
CA has quietly cleaned up its act under current CEO John Swainson, a no-nonsense software industry veteran recruited from IBM. There’s plenty more work to be done, but CA has finally ended the turf wars between its direct sales team and channel partners (see www3.ca.com/partners/).
A case in point: CompuCom is quietly cashing in on its long-term partnership with CA. The systems integrator successfully deployed CA’s Asset Management platform at Kings County Medical Center in New York. Al Porco, CIO of the medical center, has spent recent months praising the CA/CompuCom relationship, crediting the duo for vastly improving the healthcare provider’s help desk services.
Still, the CA turnaround isn’t complete. The company’s Q4 earnings warning proves that CA needs to further bolster its security, storage and management solutions-especially as rivals such as Symantec continue to acquire rival offerings. And CA still needs to win over some skeptical VARs who got burned by the company’s aggressive direct sales tactics under former CEO Kumar.
Even so, anecdotal evidence suggests the CA makeover is for real.