Computer Associates’ purchase of the artificial intelligence software house of AI Ware last December turns out to have been a pretty strategic buy that’s designed to propel Unicenter further ahead in its long running systems management battle with IBM’s Tivoli division. AI Ware provides CA with an neural network-based engine that it reckons will help shape Unicenter into an ‘intelligent’ systems and network management system. This would be able to predict problems by recognizing patterns in large streams of data and, in so doing, work out the probability of transition from one state to another. It will then refine the accuracy of probability over time and either suggest fixes or repair the problem – rather like the concept of a ‘self-healing network’ – or at least that’s the theory. Of course, artificial intelligence software will always have its limitations. Even if CA delivers on its goal of turning Unicenter into a smart software suite, the thing will never be able to legislate for human error. Nevertheless, the idea that it could make systems administration more autonomous, and therefore easier, is an undeniable attraction both to existing Unicenter users and new prospects alike. Keenly aware of the fact, CA has moved swiftly to produce a Unicenter bolt on for predictive analysis that uses the neural network-based engine within AI Ware’s flagship CAD/Chem product. We expect it will unleash the product to the market in the next few months. CA tells us this promises to be the first product that will enable systems administrators using the new Unicenter (TND – The Next Dimension) interface to carry out predictive systems management – to determine that a web server, for example, has a 70% chance of crashing within the next 40 minutes, say. Further out, CA is most likely to take other technology developed at AI Ware such as its so-called ‘guided evolutionary simulated annealing optimization engine’ which links neural nets to memory addressing, and add further intelligent problem solving capabilities to Unicenter. AI Ware technology is also likely, in some form, to be embedded in its Jasmine and Ingres RDBMS. CA has been working with AI Ware for at least 18 months on joint development projects, so producing a bolt-on product that has the same GUI as TND is something that already seems to have been covered. We understand CA is already beta testing the product in-house and rollout to general availability does look imminent. The company will undoubtedly elaborate on the product direction at CA-World in New Orleans at the end of the month. However, developing any deep integration other than at the API level could be a challenge purely because Unicenter has never been developed from the ground up. It has a number of repositories that require separate development kits to customize. While Unicenter users will undoubtedly welcome the new features that AI Ware will bring, its existing customer base may not be so happy. AI Ware’s 500 or so customers which include a broad spread of clients such as Dow Chemical, Unilever, Proctor & Gamble, Air Products & Chemicals, 3M and Goodyear, will no doubt feel they are about to become party to the usual CA treatment. In this case, standalone product development work looks likely to grind to a halt with the company merely honoring existing maintenance contracts. Customers using CAD/Chem will have spent around $25,000 – $30,000 in software and services. Users of Business Advisor, its modeling and decision support system that can be used for demand forecasting and credit risk assessment, will have shelled out around $60,000 for a single license and consulting. CA’s senior VP for product strategy, Yogesh Gupta, told us that the efforts of the Unicenter R&D team will understandably be channeled into developing the CAD/Chem search engine as an integral part of Unicenter. Enhancements to AI Ware products – Cad/Chem, Process Advisor and Business Advisor – will be less of a priority. The group of AI Ware customers that are most likely to be affected will be those who have bought a one time license without a maintenance contract – and that number is high. Roughly half of the installed base – approximately 250 sites – have maintenance contracts. The others do not. Cad/Chem, AI Ware’s flagship package, is a formulation modeling and optimization suite designed for automated non-linear modeling, model validation and sensitivity analysis which comes with a toolkit billed as designing better products faster. Originally developed for Unix workstations in the late 1980s, the company managed to get CAD/Chem down to a small enough footprint for it to run on in a PC environment. Roughly 80% of AI Ware’s customers use Cad/Chem for Windows on NT. AI Ware carried out a major re- write of the software and released an ‘enhanced’ 32-bit version of Windows 95/NT just a few months ago. But is this the last upgrade AI Ware users will see?
M&A Impact.
