CA users seem more interested in products than takeover fight

Computerworld - ORLANDO -- Despite recent challenges, including a proxy fight, a number of its users are upbeat about Computer Associates International Inc.'s future and say they believe in its product direction.

Both CA management and the Texas-based challenger who is launching a proxy fight to oust them have been vying for the support of the company's customer base at CA World here.

For its part, the Islandia, N.Y.-based software vendor unveiled a new version of its flagship network and systems management software application, Unicenter 3.0, as well as storage and security management products (see story).

The idea of swapping out CA's management and breaking the company into four independent units, as challenger Sam Wyly plans to do, had little appeal to users interviewed yesterday.

Bruce Focht, a business analyst at financial services firm J.P. Morgan/American Century in Kansas City, Mo., said that who is running CA is irrelevant "as long as they keep supporting my product." His firm uses the Jasmine ii portal to give customers access to financial data via the Web, something that formerly had to be manually done by picking through paper-based reports. Focht added that CA so far "had been good at listening to my concerns."

"Getting new management would be like having a new company, and it would be disruptive to us," said Sorel Jakins, associate director of infrastructure engineering at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah.

"We don't think there's any benefit to us to have a change," said Karl Jackson, systems specialist at BYU. He noted that the university already has a close relationship with CA's management.

Both Focht and Jakins said they were far more interested in learning more about CA products, such as Unicenter 3.0.

The application's enhanced business process view feature is of particular interest to the university's IT staff. BYU has been beta-testing Unicenter 3.0 and is planning to launch it throughout the campus. BYU relies heavily on student staffers to do network monitoring, and it's much easier to train them on a product that has an easy-to-follow graphical user interface. Version 3.0 automatically identifies potential problems in the network that could affect priority systems, without needing an IT staffer to drill down deeply and discover them manually, Jakins noted.

The fact that Unicenter will integrate with portals and other parts of CA's management lineup is also attractive, said Jackson. "Upper management can look at service desk stuff like service level management and business process views in Unicenter itself, and they can understand it," he said.

Meanwhile, Wyly, who