CA restructures channel model

Reseller touts 'product-neutral' strategy

Computer Associates (CA) has restructured its business model claiming that it will pave the way for a more 'product-neutral' channel.

In his keynote speech at CA World 2002 in Orlando, president and chief executive Sanjay Kumar announced that the firm is to focus on six core areas for the coming year.

These are enterprise management (Unicenter), security (eTrust), storage (BrightStor), application lifecycle management (AllFusion), data management (Advantage) and portal and business integration (CleverPath).

Each core area will have a number of 'brand units' centred around it such as development, marketing support, and product marketing.

"We wanted to rearrange the company to make it more flexible and powerful," said Kumar, maintaining that the "entire software industry will have to follow [the model] over the coming years".

CA is also set to announce a refined channel strategy which the company has been working towards for the past 12 months, explained Kumar.

"It is important for our customers to see a uniform view of CA products and we are launching a channel-neutral strategy across the company," he added.

A lot of vendors are moving towards a direct focus, but CA has the ability to leverage the channel in a different way and work together with partners rather than against them, Kumar said.

Tarkan Maner, vice president of corporate marketing at CA, agreed. "The channel is very important to CA especially in the security and storage business and the application lifecycle management," he said.

"As a result we are making our strategy much more modular, or Lego-based, which makes it easier for resellers and distributors to deal with."

CA launched its channel symposium at this year's event aimed at helping its resellers and distributors get to grips with the changing world of ebusiness.

Kumar also revealed that CA is set to make a number of "exciting" announcements about storage and security over the coming week.