Q&A: Former Novell CTO Alan Nugent on his move to CA

'My move had nothing to do with Novell,' he says

By Matt Hamblen

March 24, 2005 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - Having just left his post as chief technology officer of Novell Inc., Alan Nugent will become senior vice president and general manager of the Unicenter business unit at Computer Associates International Inc. on April 8. An industry veteran, Nugent will oversee the direction of CA's largest unit, which is devoted to a wide range of Unicenter management products for servers, applications, desktops and data centers.
He talked today with Computerworld's Matt Hamblen.
Why move and why now? I had been talking to CA for a couple of months. CA has a lot of the pieces for management software in-house, and it's a great opportunity to get back into a line job again. CA's market reach and scope is unparalleled. It is a really great, upward opportunity, and my move had nothing to do with Novell. They'll crank along and do fine.
Was CA's new president and CEO, John Swainson, a key reason to move? John's background is appealing relative to his technical prowess. John and the rest of the company have a solid plan, and the directions are correct.
Swainson has talked about needing to consolidate hundreds of products at CA, while possibly eliminating some. What's your view? At a philosophical level, it makes sense. We'll rather quickly assess the totality of the product suites and make decisions about what works well and what doesn't. I can't give any specifics about numbers, but the idea is there are a lot of products, so it seems logical that consolidation would be one of the first things to do.
Corporate IT managers say systems and software are too complex. Your thoughts? Complexity is a huge worry. I want to absolutely reduce complexity both for us inside CA and outside. It is a mess out there, partly because of the combined effect of all the vendors' products. I'm juiced about the notion of effectiveness and efficiency. Too many customers don't feel enough is coming from any one vendor to be effective or efficient. ...Unicenter is absolutely the right framework to reduce diversity and complexity, and it's good timing in the sense that the industry is moving in that direction.
Do you see changes to the Unicenter staff? I don't know them well enough yet.

Alan Nugent will join Computer Associates.

Do you think the concept of on-demand computing, or autonomic computing, is catching on? On demand is the "marketecture" word for it. But it's fair to say that at one point, we're going to see IT environments that behave like some of the vendors

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