InformationWeek

For the man at the helm of the $6.2 billion software powerhouse, the question is apparently rhetorical. Wang knows where he wants his company to go--and seems to have a plan to navigate CA safely to port through these uncharted E-business waters.

CA has the technology to make a big E-business splash, analysts say. They note that the company's strengths in back-office management systems give it a formidable toolset to integrate with the new E-business applications it's unveiling, yet they also say that CA hasn't done the best job of getting its E-business message out.

But CA, with more than 500 software applications in its arsenal, is turning its ships swiftly. At its annual CA World user conference last month, the company's flagship systems-and network-management software, Unicenter TNG, was mentioned only in passing. Instead, CA focused most of its announcements around its new integrated E-business platform, Jasmineii, and a flurry of new E-business partnerships.

Unveiled for general availability on April 10, E-business functionality in Jasmineii includes an application server, transaction server, messaging server, a middleware object request broker, publish-subscribe engine, events, naming, compression, security, encryption, and cache management, as well as support for the Extensible Markup Language, Java, and Enterprise JavaBeans. Jasmineii can run on top of the Jasmine object-oriented database or any database. Jasmineii also taps CA's neural network technology, known as Neugents, for predictive capabilities, such as E-business modeling and dynamic Web-site personalization. CA also plans integrated E-commerce applications, such as supply chain and logistics, to run on top of Jasmineii.

Also at CA World, the vendor introduced 22 customers and partners who are powering part or all of their Web sites with Jasmineii. Its largest partnership announcement: CA and the $70 billion Japanese trading company Nissho Iwai Corp. are forming a company to launch a global, cross-industry, business-to-business Web marketplace. CA will develop the exchange in Jasmineii, manage the infrastructure with Unicenter TNG, and secure the exchange with its eTrust technologies.

"A year and a half ago, CA didn't realize the E-business opportunity," says Steve Foote, an analyst with Enswers.com. "Now, they realize it, as they got closer [to their customers] and saw them developing business-to-business applications. In the last six to eight months, they began to craft a message based around what their customers are actually trying to do."

E-business has been a sizable portion of CA's business for some time, contends Yogesh Gupta, CA's senior VP of E-business strategy. Roughly half of the company's revenue for the year ending Dec. 31 came from clients moving forward with E-business initiatives, he says. "Our business is being driven tremendously by E-business," he says--but he concedes that the figure is based on a broad definition, including electronic data interchange.

The quarter ending Dec. 31 was CA's best of the fiscal year to date, with revenue totaling about $1.8 billion. That's up from roughly $1.4 billion for the same quarter the previous year and up more than $200 million from the prior quarter.

For all of 1999, about 86%, or $4.51 billion, of the company's revenue resulted directly from product sales, while only $742 million, or 14%, was derived from maintenance and service sales. CA will report its results for the quarter ending March 31 this week; Chuck Philips at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter says CA is having an impact on the competition and has raised per-share estimates for its upcoming quarter to $3.90.

According to Melissa Eisenstat, an analyst with CIBC Openheimer, CA's revenue for mainframe software sales hovers between 45% to 50% of the company's total sales. And with roughly half of its total sales related to traditional network systems management, the company's Unicenter line--though neglected at CA World--remains one of its product bastions. But customers shouldn't expect general availability of Unicenter's next major upgrade--Unicenter TND: The Next Dimension--anytime soon.

After several years in development, CA finally shipped a beta version of Unicenter TND this March. The product was supposed to be commercially available last year, but most analysts agree that it could be another year to 18 months before TND reaches that stage. Still, CA remains optimistic. While Wang concedes that large companies won't be entirely managed by TND in the short term, enterprises will place the product in production to manage segments of their networks by year's end, he predicts.

When TND does become commercially available, CA hopes to deliver with it a stronger E-business systems management offering. Built on Unicenter TNG's IT-management tools, TND goes further with the added dimension of time, intelligent application integration, and 3-D visualization tools. A major benefit of TND being touted by CA is its improved information ergonomics via Web portals that present information according to end users' technical and business requirements. So, while a CEO may use TND to see a portal detailing high-level business processes, such as inventory or supply-chain trends, an IT manager will be able to view a portal in TND that details critical infrastructure performance information.

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