John Swainson on rebuilding Computer Associates
A Q&A with CA's president and chief executive officer
Follow @infoworldWhen John Swainson joined Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) nearly a year ago, he found a company reeling from three years of investigations into accounting practices that have resulted in numerous indictments and the upcoming trial of its former chief executive, Sanjay Kumar. President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Swainson, now in the second stage of a four-year plan to renew the company, spoke last week to a group of journalists from IDG on subjects including rebuilding customer relationships and CA's massive effort to retool its own IT systems.
On CA's IT systems:
The single most surprising thing I learned when I got to CA was that there was no single source of data on anything. ... If you're going to manage a business by data and facts instead of by intuition and anecdotes you have to have good data to be able to do it. And you have to have good IT systems. ... [Going through] Sarbanes-Oxley gave us a very good start, at documenting those systems, figuring out what our processes were, so that we could then move forward and integrate and automate the internal IT systems that we have and that we'd like to have.
On implementing SAP:
We are going to do an almost complete wholesale replacement, which most people don't do, and when they do do it they do it over a very extended period of time, and we're going to do it in less than three years. ... The thing that I've learned is that if you don't understand what you want your process to be, it's very hard to tell SAP what the process is. And that sounds trivial, but it is where all the problems [start]. ... No one in their right mind does this. You do this when you're desperate, you do this when you have to.
On acquisitions:
We are very focused around the three areas of systems management, storage and security. And all of the acquisitions that you've seen us make and will see us make are things that either help us in building out a leadership portfolio in those spaces, or allow us to extend those markets. ... It wouldn't surprise me if by the end of the year we did five or six or seven hundred million [dollars worth of acquisitions]. ... We have technology in [applications management] but we aren't completely comfortable that we have the right products in all the right subcategories. So we're looking hard at build-versus-buy in that space.
On customer relationships:
