Megamorphosis

CA's Carl Hartman explains his company's new brands and portal plans

Intelligent Enterprise spoke with Carl Hartman, vice president of marketing, portal, and business intelligence solutions at Computer Associates, about CA's new CleverPath portal and rebranding efforts.

IE: What is Computer Associates hoping to achieve with this rebranding?

Hartman: CA has become a pretty large company — we have grown both organically and as a result of acquisitions. We have amalgamated a tremendous portfolio of technology that is really vast — about 1200 discrete products. We realize that all this technology is a good thing, and yet it became more and more difficult for us to articulate what it is that CA stands for. We wanted to do a global outreach to the market in general.

IE: What does this strategy involve and what are the new brands names?

Hartman: [O]ur 3x6 strategy ... is an enunciation of what we do at a high level — we focus on infrastructure management, information management, and both of those in support of process management. And then within those three large segments, six key focus areas really guide our business forward: enterprise management [Unicenter], security [eTrust], storage [BrightStor], application lifecycle management [AllFusion], data management and application development [Advantage], and portal and business intelligence [CleverPath].

IE: What about Jasmine?

Hartman: We've a long heritage with that name: our work for many years doing joint R&D with Fujitsu around object technologies. And so the Jasmine brand remains but becomes refocused on the object database and associated tools.

IE: How are you educating your current customers about these changes?

Hartman: The only way it really affects them is that when they get the next release of the software it may have a different name, a different splash screen on it, or the documentation may look a little different. But effectively, this branding is separate from the product development plan. Our customers are really pretty happy about more traction and spotlight shone on discrete technologies as opposed to one overall thing called Jasmine.

IE: What does the CleverPath brand include?

Hartman: The CleverPath is really the embodiment of all of CA's intelligence technologies. And those intelligence technologies we categorize in four ways. First, portal. The CleverPath brand is a portal-driven brand. All the other components in the brand plug into the portal and add value to the portal by what they do. Conversely, the portal also adds value in the other direction by giving them a different, and in many cases perhaps better, depending on the user, way of surfacing the information that they do. So, portals are at the forefront, and the three other significant areas are reporting, analysis, and operational intelligence. The operational intelligence space is where we place our advanced intelligence technologies, including roles and inferencing, predictive neural network-based technologies, and visualization technologies.

IE: What new products and releases are available in CleverPath?

Hartman: We rolled out a host of product announcements within the CleverPath brand, the first of which is CleverPath Portal 3.5, which now offers automatic deployment to almost any type of wireless device out of the box. We've also rolled out enhanced integration with a number of other tools, applications, and so forth. We're now certified on all the leading J2EE application servers. Finally, we've also done a tremendous amount of work on improving the already very good performance and scalability of the portal.

IE: Looking at the market, how would you really differentiate CA's portal offering?

Hartman: First, one of our strengths is the depth and breadth of our solution. Yes, we have a great portal engine, but we also have great technologies that plug right into it for business intelligence, operational intelligence, and visualization. And the portal itself has a great deal of feature functionality in terms of personalization, integration, and so forth. So we're actually able to compete on several levels in that market place.

IE: Looking at portals, some concentrate more on workflow, others on content management, and some are more BI oriented. Would you say that yours is more BI oriented?

Hartman: We are formally positioned as an enterprise information portal, meaning that it is applicable to all those things and has all those components. I think that if I were going to boil it all down and say what makes our portal different or better, it's that we've focused on ease of use. Ease of use has many facets: There's ease of installation, deployment, implementation, and then there's actual ease of end user use and ease of maintenance. And that's really what we've focused a tremendous amount of energy on. We're the first real drag-and-drop user interface in the portal space. We spent a lot of our time looking at what portals really do for people and how they're really used in an organization.

IE: What other releases are available in CleverPath?

Hartman: We also announced new releases of our reporting and analysis tools: CleverPath Reporter 4.0, CleverPath OLAP 5.1, and CleverPath Forest&Trees 6.5.

In the operational intelligence area we announced the 9.1 release of CleverPath Aion Business Rules Expert (formerly known as Aion). Aion is a very powerful business rules and inferencing engine that allows for the automation of very complex business processes with very simple business commands driven by the business user, as opposed to coders, programmers, or what have you. We focused on two things: enhancing productivity with improved management of what we call dynamic rules, which allow business users to change rule bases on the fly and we've enhanced our Java interface capabilities.

The last thing we announced was release 2.0 of CleverPath Predictive Analysis Server — formerly known as Neugents ii, and this is our solution for adding predictive intelligence capabilities to any application, whether it's being built from the ground up, an existing homegrown solution, or a vendor solution. In this 2.0 release, we focus on improving customer profiling and categorization capabilities as well as even faster implementations to get people started in rapid fashion.

IE: Is this the last stage of your rebranding or do you have more coming down the pipeline?

Hartman: We will be rolling out more details about the other brands such as Advantage and AllFusion as we go into the next several months. So it is both the end and the beginning.

IE: Which of these areas would you say will deliver the highest growth/profitability to CA?

Hartman: Well I think I can answer that in two ways: Certainly, areas that are very, very hot and have been for some time include security and storage, and that was made even more important with the tragic events that occurred. The value of security and good data management and disaster recovery were made glaringly apparent to many of us. But I think on the information management side, we have a tremendous amount of traction in a couple of areas: First, around the portal itself, we are recognized as a leader in that space, (according to IDC we are number one in terms of revenues).

It's a fairly small but incredibly rapid growing space, so we are obviously looking to continue our leadership position there. The other space in the information management side is in the area of application lifecycle management. But we certainly have other technologies that also drive growth — our repository technology, data warehousing technologies, and our application development technologies to name three that also continue to provide value to us and to our clients.

— Michelle M. Young

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