Computer Associates was once famously dismissed by Larry Ellison, the chief executive of Oracle Corp, with the remark that Every ecosystem has its scavenger. At one time, it was well deserved: CA bought struggling companies, did little to develop their products, and milked the captive customer base for license revenues. None of this is true today. CA, with some 500 products, is investing heavily in R&D, is developing leading technology, and has a closer relationship with its customers and partners than at any time. This is most evident in the field where it is now beginning to excel – systems management. In terms of revenue, function and profile, CA’s Unicenter is now established as the leading systems management product. If its revenue claims for Unicenter are accurate – and there are many who claim they are exaggerated – Unicenter will account for more than $1bn this year, nearly a quarter of CA’s revenues. But with many of CA’s other products languishing, that proportion is set to grow. CA will increasingly come to be seen as a systems management company, says CA executive, Sean Lamar. Unicenter has the kind of lineage that might be expected from a company which has been built largely by acquisition. In 1992 and 1993, it assembled a collection of the systems management programs it had acquired for mainframes and re-wrote them as a single suite for Unix client/server systems. With other competitors moving slowly – most notably IBM – CA found itself largely without competition.
Best of breed
Since then, Unicenter has grown in function, become more integrated, and far more popular. Most major computer suppliers have an agreement to supply the product, and systems integrators and consultancies are also building business units to implement it effectively. To fight off competition from Tivoli, CA has recently positioned Unicenter as both a product suite and a framework and therefore capable of seamlessly operating with ‘best of breed’ third-party products. Unicenter is not as integrated as TME, nor is the interfacing with partner’s products as tight, but it is a pragmatic strategy that has largely worked. This year, CA has made two major Unicenter announcements. First it relaunched the product as Unicenter TNG, incorporating a 3D interface and new agent technology. The latter is based on the Agentworks technology which it acquired with its $1.8bn acquisition of Legent in 1995. Unicenter agents enable Unicenter to control remotely all kinds of electronic devices. The use of this technology also underpinned the second important announcement of the year, the TNG Framework – a set of basic services which will be distributed at nominal cost to all kinds of computer users. The Framework is not particularly significant in itself but the strategy is: CA wants Unicenter to become ‘ubiquitous’, installed almost everywhere. While CA still needs to improve its integration by introducing object technology at the core, the combination of an easy to install base product, a lightweight low-cost framework and effective agent technology has the potential to propel it to a dominant position.
