Islandia, New York based giant Computer Associates International Inc, has closed the biggest ever quarter in its 22-year history, due mainly to a three-year 200% increase in its client/server business, as represented by its Unicenter TNG systems management suite, which grew 30% in this quarter alone. The company’s third quarter saw sales of $1.24bn, up 18% from the same period last year’s $1.05bn, with net income of $339.9m, up 19% from last year’s third quarter figure of $284.7m, which excluded the charge for the last big CA acquisition (that of $598m write-off of R&D associated with the purchase of Cheyenne Software Inc). The company had some bad news for the three months though, in that foreign currency translation adversely affected total revenue by some $41m for the period, which knocked 8% off its international growth figure. For its first nine months, then, CA has increased overall revenue by 15%, from $2.84bn to $2.25bn, with net income up 22%, to $767.6m, from last year’s $627.9m (all figures for 1997 exclude the Cheyenne charges). In geographies, Europe seems to have been relatively disappointing – it is merely described as making good progress – and Asia, rather uniquely for a computer company at the present, had good growth (but from an admittedly modest base). Overall CA is now making some 33% of its total business from outside North America. The company points to the final shipment of its Jasmine object-oriented database in the quarter and further developments of Unicenter as the strongest reasons for belief in future growth opportunities.
