Mark Barrenechea, senior vice president of product development at Computer Associates, took issue with statements made about CA by Mills in the interview posted on our Web site on April 20. He spoke with Computerworld's Don Tennant on April 22 to rebut those comments.
Some IT and financial analysts have put Steve Mills on the list of potential replacements for Sanjay Kumar. What's your response to that? Let me put that in perspective from what I see. IBM in fiscal year '03 did $90 billion in total revenue. The software business did just under $14 billion. So 16% of IBM's revenues are software. Software is an afterthought at IBM. It's all about global services and hardware. [Mills] is the VP of afterthought.
Mills suggested that CA isn't particularly innovative. What's your response? I've been here at CA now for close to a year [following a move from Oracle], and I find the organization one of the most skilled and innovative I have seen in the industry. When you look at our Q3 results, we grew 42% in subscription licenses. When you look at IBM's growth [for its first quarter] that they just announced recently, [and] you [adjust for] currency, they grew at 3%. We are the world's leader in management software. If you compare our innovation to IBM's, IBM has a long history of failed attempts. We can look at OS/2 not being a successful operating system. We can look at SNA losing out to IP. We can look at Lotus losing the e-mail, Word and Excel battle.
When I asked Mills about IBM's acquisition of Candle Corp., he said CA has a history of acquiring companies like Candle and "just wants to charge the customer a lot of money and not give them any incremental value." What's your response? Candle is a very interesting acquisition in IBM's history. After 40 years, IBM couldn't get performance management right. So they had to go out and buy Candle.
Did CA ever look at Candle as an acquisition target? No. The value we're bringing to clients today around Sysview and OPS/MVS is unsurpassed. And after 40 years, [IBM] couldn't build performance management like [CA's] Unicenter NetMaster. So we never looked at Candle. We weren't interested, and we're still not interested.
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| Mark Barrenechea of Computer Associates |