Computer Associates International Inc is vacuuming up the systems management market at a rate of knots and what business it sales people cannot win, management simply buys up. Latest to fall into its lap is NCR Corp, which, now free of Ma Bell’s apron strings, is retiring its One Vision management suite which is based upon Hewlett-Packard Co OpenView and recommending use of CA-Unicenter in its place. CA is creating versions of Unicenter for NCR’s TopEnd OLTP, LifeKeeper failover software Teradata database customers. The chief attraction for NCR is that Unicenter supports both Unix and NT, indeed the first port of Unicenter for NT-on-Intel is the one CA will do for NCR. Unicenter 1.1 is available now for NCR’s UnixWare-based customers, a 1.5 cut is due this quarter as well as a 2.0 edition for NCR’s own SVR4 Unix implementation. Unlike CA’s other systems management buddy DEC, NCR will not resell Unicenter, although it will provider service and support. CA also gets NCR’s Computer Manager and Software Manager products which lived in the Operations Advantage suite under the AT&T regime. Analysts were positioning the move as a nice exit strategy for NCR but a kick in the teeth for HP
