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Rebuilding CA's bridges

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John Swainson

Martin LaMonica CNET News

Published: 23 Feb 2005 16:55 GMT

How does open source play into all of this? CA's Ingres database is open source. But if you're focusing on systems management and security, what is its role?
I don't want to fight in the [database] market place head-to-head against Oracle and IBM and Microsoft on their rules. I sold DB2 for years against Oracle. It was a better product and at lower cost, and we may have made 1 percent market share difference. And that's with tens of millions of dollars in marketing budgets and thousands of people. We're just not in a position to do that.

If you can't go and sell it head-to-head, what do you do? You create community where you could make it part of the open source platform... It's another way of attacking the market place as opposed to just a frontal assault. Taking on the big guys on their territory and their terms, that's hard to do.

Do you see open source products coming into the management security areas?
I can see it. Open source is neither good nor bad. It's not necessarily the number one [threat]; it's only a threat. If you believe that you have a God-given right to establish a space and live there forever, then guess what? Competitive pressures of every kind will eventually force you out of that space. Open source is really one of those competitive pressures.

I think it's a very healthy discipline for the industry so they'll have to keep innovating. It forces people to keep thinking about what their customers need and where they need to go next, and that's a great thing.

Sun has talked about doing its own database, and it would seem that CA's Ingres would be an obvious choice for that.
It's not something that's in the works, but it makes absolutely no sense for Sun to go and build an open source database, particularly when Ingres is now an open source project.

There's a lot of talk of how there are too many open source licenses. What are your thoughts?
I think the industry does need to converge around a standard commercial license. The problem with the GPL guys is they want all things to be GPL. Believe me, I understand what GPL is. I think GPL is a fine licence for certain classes of things, but it's not necessarily going to be the licence that everybody uses for everything. There is a place for a nonviral licence.

CA grew by acquiring and was never really known as an engineering-led company. Do you think you can be an innovative company from a technology point of view?
We can be an innovative company. The truth is there is a lot of very cool stuff at CA that has been developed inside CA. But it's not well-known. Part of what I want to do is reshape the company as a trustworthy, innovative partner for our customers.

Is that your vision for what CA should be?
It's still a work in progress so I haven't reduced it down yet, but I'll share with you a little bit of it.

We believe that we have a natural franchise, a natural market around enterprise-infrastructure management, security and systems management. We want to be known as the trusted partner of our customers in those things.

It doesn't take a big stretch to get there. On the product side, we're already in those security and systems management spaces. But I'm not satisfied that our customer relationships are at the stage where we want them to be. To me, trusted partners means they're something very special, and I'm not under any illusions that we're there yet.