UPDATED: Computer Associates is shuffling its business units in order to adapt to the shifting winds in the industry.
The company’s new CEO, John Swainson, said Tuesday that CA would alter its organizational chart in order to give more power to unit general managers in five areas.
Shannon Lapierre, a spokeswoman at CA, said the realignment process began
two years ago with the eTrust product and was accelerated after Swainson
came on board.
“It was segregated before so that product development was separate from the
product marketing,” she said. “There wasn’t that linked-in vertical
alignment within the unit.”
The realignment, she said, puts the support structure into
the same business unit in which the product resides.
The business units are: Enterprise Systems Management, Security Management, Storage Management, Business Service Optimization (BSO), and CA Products Group.
The general managers will manage their unit’s product development, marketing, staffing, planning and execution and customer satisfaction, and they will be responsible for their unit’s profits and accountable for the losses.
“The business unit structure is a proven tool in the technology industry and is a natural next step for CA,” Swainson said in a statement. “We will maintain our focus on the integration of solutions and ensure this continues to be a competitive advantage.”
The organizational realignment is the first major step undertaken by the former IBM veteran since taking control of the company’s operations in February. He replaced interim
CEO Kenneth Cron, who helmed the company following the “35-day” financial scandal that ultimately led to
the ouster of Sanjay Kumar.
In a letter sent to CA employees Tuesday, Swainson outlined six priorities
for the company to achieve in the next 12 months, one of which was the
business unit realignment.
Swainson is also shaking up the company’s sales force, instituting a
solutions- and relationship-based focus to replace its existing product- and
transaction-based selling strategy. CA will also focus on indirect sales
through its partners, which currently only make up less than 10 percent of
the company’s overall revenues. The industry average, he said, is 51
percent.
Other areas for improvement, Swainson said, include holding the company to
the highest ethical standards and creating an ethical, performance-based
culture that rewards hard work.
The five business units fall under Russell Artzt, CA executive vice
president for products. He will also oversee the company’s efforts to
develop new software and integrate acquired products into the CA
architecture, as well as the company’s overall customer support division and
the newly-formed small and medium business (SMB) program office.
Two existing business units, security and storage management, will continue to operate as before with the same leadership. A new business service optimization unit was added and two units will consolidate disparate job roles throughout the company.
Former Novell CTO Alan Nugent is expected to join CA later this week to take over the enterprise systems management unit. His job duties will entail building up the company’s systems and database management strength in the mainframe and distributed computing environments. Most of the company’s Unicenter products fall under this division.
CA created a new business service optimization unit to gain market strength in the life cycle and systems management industries. The unit will focus on business process modeling, IT governance, change management and IT service management. Jacob Lamm, former Unicenter product development lead, will take over the new post.
The CA products group is for everything else that falls outside the core areas of systems and security management. The unit, led by Mark Combs, a development executive within the company, will focus on growing these products with customers and tailoring the technology to customer specifications and building up technology currency.
Officials expect to be able to provide financial results by business unit in its fiscal year 2006 first quarter reports.
“These five business units will give us an effective way to meet our
customer needs and market and develop industry-leading products,” Artzt said in a statement. “In addition, we will still have a number of centralized functions to streamline the overall management of the group to ensure that we continue to think ahead in terms of customer needs.”
