Once the dust has settled on Computer Associates’ $3.5bn takeover of Platinum Technology, it is likely to become clear that many of the products so assiduously collected by Platinum over the years will be sifted through, and either sold off, or quietly dumped. CA has no qualms in ending the life of duplicate products and is going to behave no differently with this acquisition, says Jonathan Eunice at Illuminata. And there is, after all, a great deal of overlapping of products arising from a marriage of two enterprise software vendors that have been equally acquisitive.

Since its inception in 1981, Platinum has bought over 60 database management utilities, 24 systems management products, a raft of datawarehousing tools, as well as a market leading data modeling product in ErWin, when it paid $170m for LogicWorks just a year ago.

Almost all of the products in Platinum’s systems management portfolio are competitive with CA’s own toolsets and are therefore likely to have a pretty limited life span. That said, Platinum is deemed to have better scheduling (AutoSys) and better performance management tools (EPM and others), but otherwise the purchase does not provide much that CA does not already have. The relative strength of AutoSys in particular has led to speculation that it might be the only product that will emerge unscathed from CA’s brutal product rationalization plans. It is significantly better and has a large enough installed base to warrant keeping, says Eunice, who argues the product will become part of CA’s IT standalone workgroup and enterprise management tools

There is also an outside chance that CA might choose to incorporate the Platinum POEMS architecture into its Unicenter enterprise systems management framework. But it is an outside chance. The only way the framework stands any chance of survival is if CA plans to continue developing Platinum tools on which POEMS hang, as it would have to re-engineer its entire tool suite to retrofit these product to fit into the Platinum architecture. And that would only be worthwhile if CA was trying to lose the ‘framework’ tag once and for all.

Aside from systems management tools, Platinum brings a fairly comprehensive suite of datawarehousing products, plus a number of application development tools. Platinum had been articulating a vision for datawarehousing for a number of years and had delivered on that vision through a number of acquisitions. It bought EIS software and Forest &Trees from Trinzic in 1995 and followed the purchase with another acquisition a year later in the shape of Infobeacon, an OLAP tool for creating multi- dimensional views on top of a relational database, from Infobeacon.

Platinum used these acquisitions to build DecisionBase, a supposed ‘Informatica-killer’ data transformation engine. Coupled with what might be regarded as Platinum’s masterstroke, the acquisition of LogicWorks, Platinum has produced a data design tool and transformation engine combination that is widely considered to be one of the most effective pairings in this market place. However, whether CA – a newcomer to datawarehousing – will be able to carry this momentum forward remains to be seen.

In the applications development space, Platinum’s most significant products are the Paradigm Plus CASE tool and ErWin, which has earned itself a place in history as one of the only tools Rational let slip from its grasp when Platinum bought LogicWorks. LogicWorks was fairly successful in cultivating channels to sell ErWin into the data modeling market but Platinum failed to utilize the ErWin channel as a vehicle through which to sell Paradigm Plus and it faded into relative obscurity. However, ErWin alone will not make CA a development tools company although the product is nonetheless strategic. CA is therefore like to adopt the acquisition model it first used when it bought Cheyenne in 1997 ie retain the products brand identity and channel as it has successfully done with ArcServe.

Despite its energetic forays into the development space, Platinum has always been more successful with database administration tools. However, this is scant solace to any DBA that relies on Platinum’s products. CA has always competed head-to-head with Platinum in this market and is therefore likely to can acquired products in favor of its own. The real value in this part of Platinum’s product portfolio however, is in the pivotal role it plays in the Microsoft repository and all that goes with it.

Platinum’s deal with Microsoft means that the emerging Microsoft repository has the same API as the Platinum repository. In fact, they share a large part of their code bases. At the moment Microsoft has a specific use in mind for its repository, which involves storage of COM objects and definitions of COM interfaces for development tools. As a result, there are huge chunks of enterprise computing where Platinum, in collaboration with (or rather, the acquiescence of) Microsoft, can build metamodels for its repository. It is a strategy that follows the lines of ‘Today the Repository, Tomorrow the World’ and only one other company is playing a similar game – Rational Software – which is promoting the UML language as a standard way of describing the semantics of components.

There are grand designs behind the repository including a universal data dictionary, wher in due course, everything will be stored. Corporate meta data will really be the crown jewels – corporations will not be able to write or maintain any applications without it. CA therefore occupies a very strong position vis-a-vis Microsoft which, after all, is an enviable position in which to be