John Swainson, chief executive officer of CA , says his company has little choice but to team with Microsoft.
“We partner with Microsoft out of necessity,” he said during a media roundtable at CA World.
Swainson added that he would lump IBM and Hewlett-Packard into the Microsoft category. “We have no choice. Our business is management security with large IT environments and Microsoft is a huge presence in those environments. No one is predicting their demise, and so they are going to be around for a long time to come,” he said.
Microsoft, which this week announced revenue of US$14.40 billion for the quarter ended March 31, a 32 per cent increase over the same period of the prior year, was a the sole platinum sponsor for this week’s CA World conference.
Even though he did not want to speak for Microsoft, Swainson said he believes what that company gets out of the CA partnership is credibility in the enterprise space.
“We help them with enterprise level solutions that add more value than they would publicly talk about. I do understand that we enable them to be successful in the enterprise and it is a calculated issue,” Swainson said.
CA’s end of the bargain is attaining valuable Microsoft APIs, he said.In the end, Swainson viewed the Microsoft partnership as a “fair trade.”
CA today is a US$4 billion company. Before it was plunged into its accounting and governance scandal it was a US$5 billion company, which is nearly the same amount of revenue that Microsoft reported in its record-setting quarter. Microsoft’s operating income was US$6.59 billion and its net income was US$4.93 billion.
Swainson, who built IBM’s Websphere business from scratch into a billion dollar entity, said CA today has a great product line that can deliver on all of the company’s components under the Enterprise IT Management strategy.
“Those are the things we need to do to grow and have a healthy company. I feel I lot better today than the people who were here when we were a US$5 billion company.” Michael J. Christenson, CA’s COO, said there is a large opportunity for the company to penetrate more of the market with the channel.
During the CA World conference, the Islandia, N.Y.-based company made investments in its channel business. Christenson said that CA is roughly a 20 per cent indirect company worldwide. However, Christenson said if you include anytime a partner touches the CA business it may be about a third of company revenue.
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