CA stumbles in bid to achieve indirect goal

Computer Associates (CA) is not on target to meet its plan to generate half of its revenue through the channel by 2002.

A year ago at the software vendors' annual partner and customer conference CA World, chief executive Charles Wang said the developer wanted to achieve 50 per cent of its sales through partners within four years.

But speaking at this year's conference in New Orleans, Wang was vague on detailing a specific time for the vendor to meet its channel sales objective.

"I can't predict when we will reach 50:50 (between direct and indirect sales), particularly when direct sales are growing so fast, but maybe it will be five years before we reach that level," he said.

But Wang stressed that channel sales - about 35 per cent of the total - were growing faster than direct sales.

"Our channel is fairly strong at the moment. We recently named all the accounts with which we deal direct, and our indirect sales are focused on the SME sector," added Wang.

Wang said that the strength of CA remained its platform neutrality and highlighted the importance of maintaining a heterogeneous systems environment.

"Ten years ago, we only sold mainframe systems and now it's less than 50 per cent of our business. Then a few years ago we were told that client/server would not survive, but it's still here. Now we are told that web-to-host computing and Linux is the way forward."

CA is expected to inform the audience at the CA World conference that it will can its reseller Varsity programme and replace it with VIP. The move follows criticism of the Varsity scheme in Europe.