CA has created a new business unit focused on companies with 500 to 5,000 employees and revenues of $100 million to $1 billion to bring its Enterprise IT Management strategy to the mid-market.The new unit, announced here at CA World, will push products exclusively through the channel, supported by up to 350 employees with its own R&D, product management, marketing, business development, and pre- and post-sales support.
CA believes this market contains 66,000 businesses worldwide and is worth $10 billion in annual sales.
“A lot of talk about EITM, and it has been focused on large organization and the large global system integrators, but the govern, manage and secure components in the 16 new CA Capability Solutions, which were released at CA World, span all areas of business,” said Bob Davis, the company’s senior vice president and general manager, mid-market and storage business unit.
Davis said that customers in both the enterprise and mid-market space expect to have solutions that are simple, integrated and have a unified environment, but want them delivered differently.
The unit’s first order of business was to release CA Recovery Management, a solution that integrates back up and recovery capabilities. More products will follow, Davis added.
“Too often a mid-market strategy is taking an enterprise product and using distribution to get to the mid-market. It needs to be different and needs innovation the way it is packaged and priced,” Davis said.
Bill Lipsin, the worldwide channel chief for CA, said the mid-market hasn’t been penetrated well by the company or its partners. “There will be no direct sales coverage, and it is wide open ground for our partners to work with us,” Lipsin said.
A large portion of the potential 66,000 companies do not have large IT departments, or are running IT through a managed service, he added.
For the Canadian market, Lipsin said that the vast majority of accounts would be in the lower part of the mid-market.
Todd Pekats, director of strategic alliances for CompuCom Systems Inc., a Dallas-based outsourcing and systems integration specialist with Canadian offices in Ottawa, Calgary and Mississauga, Ont., said CA’s new mid-market and storage unit will help reduce costs and complexity for his customers.
From his company’s experience, mid-market customers are looking for a hybrid approach. “One size does not fit all,” Pekats said.
He believes the software solutions available and installed today in companies have created complexity in data centres, and with that, more costs.
CompuCom has even changed its business model to align itself better to mid-market customers to take advantage of the large market.“It is important to our growth. We are betting on this and we have already started to invest in it,” he said.
Lipsin has increased the number of channel account managers because of this new business unit.
He has also ironed out the potential conflict with the channel and the 800 CA direct sales staff. They will be paid even for a sale done through a partner.
Lipsin expects some partner growth in terms of the number of VARs because of this new unit, but said it will not be dramatic. “We are doing a geography by geography analysis for partner growth. First we will look at our current partner base for investment. Maybe we’ll find we may not need any new partners. Maybe we have too many. Potentially there may be some more in selective geographies,” he said.
EITM strategy
CA unveiled 16 new solutions for the EITM strategy, first announced 18 months ago at the last CA World conference.
The new applications, dubbed CA Capability Solutions will fall under three broad categories: ‘govern’, ‘manage’ and ‘secure.’
Ten of the solutions focus on the management of service levels, configuration, help desk, application performance, availability, network and voice, virtual systems, workload automation, database, and recovery.
CA’s identity and access management, security information management and threat management products are part of the secure group.
CA chief technology officer Al Nugent said EITM was just a vision 18 months ago.
Back then EITM was focused only on management and security. Nugent added that CA needed to expand the definition and include governance. “Governance is a topic for every CIO,” he said.
The new govern group will consist of project and portfolio management, IT asset and financial management and CA Information Governance.
John Fechenback, practice director for CA partner Xinify of San Ramon, Calif., said EITM is one of the largest growth areas in the management and control of the IT product lifecycle. It allows IT management and senior executives to be able to work from the same common data and eliminate the disconnects between the corporate strategic objectives and the actual projects planned or in progress.
CA is also engaging the channel to deliver EITM. Company CEO John Swainson said in his keynote address that strengthening channel relationships is the No. 2 priority for the company, behind strengthening customer relationships.
“We are much more proactive than in the past to bring on more technology partners,” Nugent said. “We have the right attitude and the channel is where the market starts and stops.”
CA has already moved 4,000 global accounts to international service integrators such as Deloitte & Touche and Accenture, as well as some enterprise solution providers, in an attempt to build out the small and medium enterprise for the company.
According to Lipsin, there are 10,300 accounts in the direct space, but the company has developed a co-existing strategy where its global system integrators will work with the channel on implementing solutions.
Deb Golden, a principal at Deloitte & Touche for security and privacy services practice, said that when her company goes to market with CA it uses sub-contractors, such as enterprise solution providers and commercial channel partners, when clients ask or if it needs to get an expertise the firm does not have.