CA loses its CTO

CA Inc. is losing one of its key executives, as Chief Technology Officer Mark Barrenechea made a surprise announcement Wednesday that he’s leaving the software company for a new role in the venture-capital world.

Barrenechea will join private equity firm Garnett & Helfrich Capital as a director on June 19, he said. The VC company specializes in buying up non-core operations from IT companies and then rebuilding them as new firms. CA spun off its Ingres open-source database business to Garnett & Helfrich last year. Barrenechea was CA’s representative on startup Ingres’ board.

When asked who approached whom, Barrenechea described the process as “mutual courting.” He said he was reminded of a famous quote from U.S. inventor Thomas Edison, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

As for his replacement, CA’s currently looking and expects to make an appointment promptly, he said.

One of the most visible and quotable members of CA’s management team, Barrenechea helped steer the company through an estimated $1.7 billion in acquisitions over the past 18 months. CA’s been looking to beef up its presence in security, storage, business service optimization and enterprise systems management through the purchases of companies including Aprisma, Concord, Cybermation, iLumin, Netegrity, Niku, and Wily.

Barrenechea only took over as CA’s CTO in January from Yogesh Gupta, but prior to that Barrenechea was the company’s technology strategist. He joined CA in 2003 from Oracle.

CA is still in the middle of a complete transformation of its operations, begun when John Swainson officially took over as chief executive officer in February 2005. CA is trying to reinvent itself in the wake of an accounting scandal that laid waste to most of its top executives. That past came to the fore last month when the company’s former CEO Sanjay Kumar pleaded guilty to financial fraud charges.

Garnett & Helfrich’s first round of spin-off ventures centered on CA’s Ingres, thin-client device and technology maker Wyse Technology and the blade server switch operations of Nortel Networks.

Barrenechea will help craft the second round of spin-offs, extending the Garnett & Helfrich business model to both Asia and Europe. “I’ll help find the businesses, raise money, do the acquisition, build the management team and recast the business,” he said. Barrenechea finds his new role’s breadth particularly attractive.

For the second group of spin-offs, Garnett & Helfrich is looking at software, media and communications and hardware companies, he said. Within the software world, both open-source technologies and applications are enticing.