CA seeks revival at user show

At its user conference this week in Las Vegas, Computer Associates will have its work cut out as a new management team attempts to regain the trust of CA’s customers in the wake of an accounting scandal and a legacy of poor customer support.

CA’s imminent Unicenter revamp, Version 11, will be one of the centerpieces of the CA World show. Scheduled to ship this quarter, the overhaul is Unicenter’s first major update in several years. CA’s Unicenter suite of systems management software is one of the lines CEO John Swainson views as core to CA’s future, along with its growing security software business.

The show also will give Swainson, on the job for 10 months, his first opportunity to discuss in-depth with customers his plans for reviving growth and innovation at CA. The company’s long trail of acquisitions throughout the 1990s left in its wake a trail of unhappy customers alienated by poor product development and support.

Positioning CA as a renewed company ready to be a software-industry leader is key to winning back customers’ trust, said IDC analyst Stephen Elliot. “This is, first, time for the new management team to address some of these issues in detail, to really look at the product lines and support practices.”

Repairing CA’s reputation with customers burned by its aggressive tactics is a slow, painstaking process, Swainson acknowledged in a recent interview. “There’s such long memories to some of our clients,” he said.

In a separate move last week, CA sold its Ingres open source database technology to private equity firm Garnett & Helfrich Capital, which is forming a new company to develop and market the software.