Charles Wang: The first time I went to work for this guy at Standard Data, he wanted me so badly that he went ahead and printed business cards. He was in the service bureau at that time, so he didn't know software. So he spelled it s-o-f-t-w-e-a-r. What an impression he made. I looked at him -- I said close but no cigar. OK, let's go. Let's get started.

InformationWeek: Charles, we wanted to talk to you on the eve of CA World 2000 about where you think CA is going. We want to talk to you about E-business, CA's place in E-business, your opinions about E-business and how it's evolving, and then maybe some questions about customer centricity, focusing on customers, that kind of thing.

Wang: How much time you need?

InformationWeek: I thought we had two hours.

Wang: So I saved an hour. I put three hours. Okay, where do you want to start?

InformationWeek: CA on the eve of CA World 2000 -- its strengths and weaknesses?

Wang: I think we're pointed in the right direction, certainly, and that's very important. I think in terms of where we stand -- if you evaluate us from a technology point of view -- we're way ahead. Pure technology. We have the right platform for E-business, we understand the way it works is heterogeneous -- there's no one silver bullet, all those things I've been saying. We're right there. In terms of articulating that clearly, I don't think we're doing a good job yet. I think we're getting better and better at it. In terms of executing on the visions, I think we're doing a very good job there. So when you look at it you say, OK, so what's the problem really? We probably do a lousy marketing PR job.

If you talk to clients you'll find everyone says, "Oh, their technology is unbelievable. Oh, I didn't know they were in that business, too. I didn't know they were in security." We're only the largest provider of security on the Internet, but people say, "I didn't know they were in security." On storage: We're the largest storage software guys in the world and yet you take a look at Veritas, they're at $61 billion market cap. You look at CA -- of which we have a billion dollars in software revenue from storage -- and our market cap is $35 billion or $34 billion, whatever it is. Somewhere we're not doing a good job of articulating, but in terms of the technology, we're there.

So what we do hope on the eve of CA World is really to get everybody together and say here's where we are, here's where we're headed. Once again, it didn't change. It isn't like we said, hey, let's change the message for CA World. We just continue that, and hopefully we will learn from the clients and articulate the message better.

InformationWeek: If the message is CA is an E-business provider, or CA is the E-business provider, what is it that you need to do to spell that out?

Wang: I think people have to understand, E-business is not just creating a Web site. And I think people are beginning to understand that. We've said that before. E-business is really the integration seamlessly from your Web presence all the way through to your back office. Then you have a business.

Too often today a lot of your Web sites and E-business, E-tailing and so forth, are really run off prototypes. And what happens is technical people get together and show business people -- wow, we're on the Web. Here's a Web site. And right away the business people -- heck, I would do the same thing -- say, OK, let's go, let's open the store, come on, come on, come on. When can you get it done? And then when the rubber meets the road, you have all these issues: scalability, security, and all of that.

You guys probably buy things from the Web. Take a look next time. Sometimes you enter your name, address, and everything and it comes back misspelled so you know what happened. Somebody entered it, they processed it, they took it, and when they shipped it, they re-input the address, the whole thing. You're not integrated then. And that's a big problem. So when you say what else, we look upon E-business as really an enablement of business. The Web piece is an important piece -- it's changing the complexion of how we do business, but at the same time it has to be seamlessly integrated across all of everything you're doing in your business. Otherwise, you have another island. If you remember, we had this whole issue with client-server where we ended up with a new island. Macintosh, another little island. You've got to bring this all together -- otherwise, you're not going to succeed.

InformationWeek: So is CA fighting against some kind of client-server mainframe orientation in the marketplace or among customers?