CA to phase out sub-brands as part of integration

CA’s move to focus all its product names around a single “CA” master brand and a clear product descriptor is being driven by the company’s ongoing strategy to more tightly integrate its software, according to a CA executive.

The vendor alerted its customers earlier this week that over the next 12 to 18 months it will gradually rename its hundreds of products, doing away with sub-brands and individual product names. For instance, eTrust Access Control becomes CA Access Control.

“Customers told us that they just want simplification,” Brian Bell, senior vice president of worldwide product marketing for CA, said Friday. Users want to know from a quick glance at a product’s name what it does, he added. In surveying customers, CA discovered that having multiple sub-brands gave the sense that the vendor’s various product families weren’t well integrated with each other.

Simplifying the product names is in line with CA’s continued push under its Enterprise IT Management (EITM) road map aiming at more tightly integrating its systems management, security, business services optimization, and storage management software, Bell said.

So far, the early response from customers has been very positive, according to Bell, with some users relieved that CA has “finally” taken a step they saw as much needed. Going forward, it’s key that the vendor continues to keep customers in the loop about the progress of the name changes, he added.

CA has been assessing its branding for over a year. In some discussions with customers, it became obvious that users weren’t always clear about what CA stood for. The vendor plans to further elaborate on its EITM strategy at its upcoming CA World conference in Las Vegas in April, Bell said. At that time, “the logic and rationale of this branding strategy will become more apparent,” he added.

CA will tend to change product names as it comes out with new versions of its software, Bell said. He doesn’t expect the rebranding will result in a significant cost burden on the company. In the future, the focus on a single master brand may even enable CA to save money that would have been previously spent promoting its sub-brands, he added.

Over time, CA has changed the way it runs its business, Bell said.

In the past, CA tended to highlight products families it considered to be homegrown like its Unicenter systems management software and ran much of the rest of its largely acquired software business as a portfolio of separate products.

In recent years, the distinction between internally developed and purchased technologies has tended to fade away in favor of bringing together different product families and rapidly integrating any acquired software to fill the holes in existing products, he added.