The business unit approach has been in the works since January 2005 when the company’s president and CEO, John Swainson, outlined in an internal email his plan to move beyond brand units towards business units.
Yesterday Swainson announced that the five new business units will be: enterprise systems management, security management, storage management, business service optimization, and the CA products group.
Under the new structure business unit general managers will be accountable for all aspects of the management and financial performance of their business unit, including profit and loss, product development, marketing, customer satisfaction, strategic planning, staffing.
The move will also provide more transparency into the relative performance of CA’s business units, as the company expects to provide certain financial metrics by unit with the publication of its results for the first quarter of fiscal 2006, ending June 30, 2005.
The business unit structure is a proven tool in the technology industry and is a natural next step for CA, Swainson said in a statement. This is a truly major effort for CA, and will give us the kind of accountability necessary to drive leadership across the company and growth for the long term.
As previously reported, the five business units heads will report to Russell Artzt, who was appointed CA’s executive vice president for products in January, with the enterprise systems management unit under the stewardship of Alan Nugent, who will join CA at the end of the week having left his previous post as chief technology officer of Novell.
Nugent will focus on systems and database management for mainframe and distributed environments via the group, which will contain most of CA’s Unicenter solutions.
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Some of the others will be rolled into the business service optimization (BSO) unit, which signals a new focus for CA that will leverage the company’s existing lifecycle and systems management to target BSO via business process modeling, IT governance, IT service management, and enterprise change management.
Jacob Lamm, who was former product development lead for Unicenter, will head up the BSO unit, while Toby Weiss, formerly senior vice president for eTrust product management and marketing will lead the security management business as senior vice president and general manager. Meanwhile Chris Broderick takes on the same title at the storage business unit.
The CA products group will include all the CA products that do not fall into one of the other business units, and will be led by Mark Combs with a mandate to drive developments to meet existing customer requirements.
A number of other executives will also report to Artzt via existing or new functions and offices, one of which will be Gary Starkey, the company’s new senior vice president of the Executive Technology Advisors. Starkey will lead a team working with chief information officers and customers to understand their business challenges.
