The company said it still expects to make its GAAP and pro forma earnings per share targets, due to cost controls, but that its revenue for its fiscal first quarter will be between $830m and $850m, not $865m to $885m as expected.
CA’s warning came a day after Siebel Systems Inc and BMC Software Inc both warned that business was not as good as expected. In those cases, the companies said that big sales expected to close in the quarter had not.
CA’s new CFO Jeff Clarke said that CA’s way of accounting for software licenses as subscriptions across the lifetime of the contract means that CA did not see as big a hit as its competitors.
I looked at some comments our competitors made, a couple deals they expected to close didn’t close, Clarke said. We had some deals that we were working on that didn’t close, but because that doesn’t impact our revenue as materially it just doesn’t show up for us.
Some of the misses have been quite large, and it seems to be across the board, Clarke said. We didn’t see some of the weakness… we don’t have the same end of quarter pressures as our competitors do.
Clarke said he was relatively happy with the performance of the company. The mix of revenue was different than had been planned, he said, with a higher degree of maintenance revenue, which is deferred, than expected.
Services revenue seemed to experience the biggest material problem in the quarter, which ended June 30. Clarke said the company is really rolling up our sleeves trying to get that one turned around.
