Swainson, who helped build IBM’s famous WebSphere brand, said he expects to grow CA’s infrastructure management business both internationally and in newer, niche markets, through acquisition and internal product development.
Swainson indicated his focus is around CA’s core strengths of security, systems and storage management, rather than application servers, development, portals or integration software, where he spent much of his at time at IBM building WebSphere.
The play at CA is not the same as the play at IBM, Swainson said during a conference call hosted by CA to announce his appointment. CA is in a different position. We don’t intend to be a platform provider. We intend to partner with platform providers IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Sun.
CA poached Swainson from IBM, where he served for 26 years. Most recently, Swainson served as head of worldwide sales for IBM’s software group, having previously been general manager of the application and integration middleware group, IBM’s largest software group, which he created in 1997.
CA hopes Swainson’s appointment will help take the company a further step away from the recent painful era in which it has been dogged by scandal and undergone investigation over accounting practices, by demonstrating renewed stability at the top. CA has been under the stewardship of an interim chief executive, Kenneth Cron, since Sanjay Kumar was removed as CEO in April.
Cron said Swainson’s appointment meant an element of uncertainty has been eliminated for CA. Cron, himself, will remain in position for the next four to six months as Swainson settles in.
Having ruled out challenging platform providers like IBM, Swains said he is seeking to grow CA in infrastructure, systems and security management, in addition to wireless and emerging technology areas including single sign-on.
As the world gets more complex and people try to integrate more things the demand for security goes up and the need for what we do goes up, Swainson said.
Swainson said CA must also re-establish its relationships with customers. On the downside [there’s] clearly a legacy here of difficult customer relations. That’s something I know a lot about from my job at IBM. I’m going to be working to turn our customers back into partners from adversaries, Swainson said.
CA also said that it expects to shortly fill the position of CFO.