CA enters a brave new world

New chief executive Bill McCracken is driving change at CA

LAS VEGAS: CA has fleshed out its plans for a new direction at the CA World user event this week, under the leadership of new chief executive Bill McCracken.

Previous CA Worlds have focused mainly on high-level strategies emphasising how CA would help customers manage anything and everything they happened to be running as part of their IT infrastructure.

But at this year's event, rather than regale customers with visions of initiatives such as enterprise IT management, CA firmly put a stake in the ground for cloud computing, virtualisation and software-as-a-service.

From speaking to executives at the show, it is clear that this change of direction has been driven, very quickly, by the new chief executive.

Although McCracken was appointed to the position at the start of 2010, he was actually in charge behind the scenes from September last year, Russ Artzt, CA vice chairman and founder, told V3.co.uk.

Artzt said that McCracken has already done a tremendous job at the company, and has proved himself a strong and growth-oriented leader.

Of previous chief executive John Swainson, who led CA from 2004, Artzt said: "He did a good job of stabilising things. We had a rough time with the accounting crap."

Comparing the two, Artzt added: "Bill is very open to changing the company to be poised for growth. That's a change. I don't think we did that in the five years Swainson was here."

Artzt gave the example of the acquisition of web apps management firm Wily back in 2006, pointing out that this targeted CA's traditional customer base. Under McCracken, acquisitions are being treated as a means to gaining a foothold in new markets, such as the 'emerging enterprise'.

These are $300m to $2bn (£210m to £1.4bn) revenue firms which sit directly underneath CA's traditional customer base of global 2,000 and 3,000 companies. Artzt said that there are around 15,000 to 20,000 of them that CA is now targeting.