The 20-Year-Old Mainframe Giant Shifts Its Focus Toward Multiplatform, Client/Server Tools.
Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) of Islandia, N.Y. is the unquestioned king of the acquisition trail and phoenix of the computer industry. CA is one of the world's largest independent software providers - third in annual revenues only to Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. While Microsoft's growth was funded by its OEM operating system revenues and high-volume desktop application sales model, CA has focused on managing the information assets of large businesses, selling use licenses rather than shrink-wrap. CA's 1995 revenues ($2.6 billion) and net income ($432 million) were up 22 percent and 8 percent, respectively, compared to 1994. Meanwhile, CA's traditional reliance on mainframe-generated revenue streams continues to decline in favor of multiplatform products. CA's revenues are still heavily dependent on mainframe-based product lines, but its other multiplatform products are experiencing much higher revenue growth.
Charles B. Wang founded the U.S. subsidiary of Swiss-owned Computer Associates in 1976. In 20 years, Wang leveraged a four-man outfit selling a file management program for IBM mainframes (CA-SORT) into an industry giant. In 1988, CA was the first independent software vendor to reach $1 billion in revenue, much of it attributable to tactical and strategic acquisitions. CA is expected to achieve total revenues of approximately $3.5 billion for the whole of fiscal 1996. Double-digit income growth of at least 20 percent is also expected for fiscal 1996, before charges to account for the acquisition of Legent Corp. in mid-1995. (See Table 1.)
Three crucial early acquisitions were UCCEL, a mainframe banking application and utilities vendor; Applied Data Research (ADR), a mainframe database vendor; and Cullinet, a mainframe database and DEC VAX applications vendor. CA's current President and COO Sanjay Kumar joined the company in 1987 as a result of the UCCEL acquisition. (See the sidebar "Sanjay Kumar Speaks Out" for an interview with Kumar.) Digesting two mainframe databases at once proved difficult even for CA, and revenues suffered during 1990 and 1991. Two of its largest acquisitions occurred recently, namely Ask Group in mid-1994 and Legent Corp. in 1995. Ask Group gave CA a position in the crucial relational database market with the Ingres RDBMS. Acquiring Legent, meanwhile, removed a key competitor and contributed additional functionality to CA's flagship Unicenter product for enterprise information asset management.
CA's product portfolio is huge. The company claims some 500 application modules and packages. (A representative selection is listed in Table 2.) Of these, CA-Unicenter, CA-OpenIngres, and CA-Masterpiece/2000 are among the most important in the portfolio. Although many CA products are focused on large system or enterprise computing, CA has a number of desktop applications running under the Microsoft Windows GUI, such as the SuperCalc spreadsheet, the Visual Objects desktop application builder, and the AccPac PC LAN-based accounting suite. However, CA has never been a serious competitor to Microsoft on the desktop, and the desktop thus remains a peripheral market to CA in terms of revenue generation. CA offers CA Discover 2000 Solution to help with the Year 2000 issue, and it even has a consumer software division, 4Home Productions.
The core of CA's business, however, is its mainframe database and utility products, cross-platform database, and development tool and application suites. The bulk of CA's revenues is generated not from single-package sales but from a variety of licensing structures that include single-fee Enterprise licenses, fixed-fee Annual Subscription licenses, and monthly or yearly Term licenses. CA products are primarily purchased directly from the company.
If CA has a mantra, it must include the words "information visualization" and "ICE" (Internet commerce enabled). CA has clearly taken the phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words" to heart and is beating a path away from the GUI and toward the VUI (visual user interface). CA probably hopes others will follow its lead, because any momentum toward a multimedia-driven user interface could raise a nasty speedbump for the Microsoft Windows juggernaut.
In concert with the rest of the industry and apparently the universe as a whole, CA has also taken the Internet to heart and is moving toward serving all of its main product lines with ICE. For CA, ICE means the ability to monitor Internet/Intranet resources, users, and applications; provide transparent access to database data from Internet/Intranet applications; and secure data and program resources on Internet/Intranet servers. CA is gradually suffixing its application names with the ICE moniker, beginning with CA-Unicenter and CA-Ingres.
CA loves client/server because client/server means distributed systems, distributed systems mean heterogeneous environments, and heterogeneous environments are something that CA handles particularly well. After all, what other vendor has so many products running on so many platforms from PCs to mainframes? CA's current flagship product, CA-Unicenter, which is currently morphing into Unicenter/TNG (the next generation), is an information asset management tool that CA claims offers end-to-end resource management that brings mainframe-class system management functions to client/server networks.
CA-Unicenter offers a wide range of enterprise resource management functionality including: security and access auditing, event and alert management, storage device management, workload balancing, system help desk and problem tracking, change and configuration management, performance tuning, and output management. CA-Unicenter also supports a wide range of mainframe, Unix, and LAN platforms and operating systems covering the gamut of client/server architectures. Although competitors such as BMC Software, OpenVision Technologies, Platinum Technology, and Tivoli Systems (recently merged with IBM) can offer some of CA-Unicenter's functionality, CA's Senior Vice President of Product Strategy Yogesh Gupta claims that none can offer a single product that matches CA-Unicenter's breadth and depth.
First released four years ago, CA-Unicenter has recently been upgraded to offer more platform support, improved functionality such as ICE, and agent technology acquired from Legent Corp. But the big news is its new visual interface for managing resources using 3D representation. Instead of measuring throughput with a chart, you visualize higher throughput by seeing a thicker throughput "pipe." Instead of being told of a network break in a message, you see a broken cable connecting two nodes. CA's idea is to let you navigate your enterprise resources using a visual map that incorporates pictures, colors, and other visual cues to make it easier to assimilate complex, interlocking information. CA's Gupta calls this a "real-world" interface and sees it as a more natural way to let system managers investigate and patrol their information neighborhood.
CA is extending this visual metaphor into other application areas. The initial targets are the CA-Masterpiece/2000 financial and distribution applications and the CA-ManMan/X manufacturing suite. According to Gupta, CA aims to create nothing less than a form of virtual reality business process management. For example:
Visualizing business processes or workflows in this way could be the next big thing in client/server application technology, in which case CA may have established a visionary lead.
CA's application offerings also include the LAN-based CA-AccPac/2000 accounting modules, which use the Btrieve file management engine, and the CA-PRMS manufacturing solution. These products give CA a workgroup accounting solution, an enterprise accounting solution, and two manufacturing solutions. Despite CA's attempts to make the integration of its application product lines functionally more consistent, the previously mentioned products represent three completely different product designs originally acquired from three different vendors. Although AccPac/2000 users have an apparent migration path from workgroup accounting to Masterpiece/2000 enterprise accounting, the transition is not much different in practice than from one vendor's accounting suite to another. At least the Masterpiece/2000 and ManMan/X suites now both support the OpenIngres RDBMS, so it is a little easier to integrate these two applications through a common database engine.
CA has a number of development tools for building GUI and client/server applications. CA-Visual Realia will develop GUI-faced Cobol applications. CA-Visual Objects is positioned as the desktop application development tool for single-user and workgroup applications running on Microsoft desktops. CA-OpenRoad will develop more complex, higher transaction volume business applications that can be ported across Microsoft and Unix platforms. All acquired from third parties, these tools were early to market in the GUI application development arena. In each case these tools have not gained the same marketshare or mindshare as equivalent packages such as Cobol tools from Microfocus, Microsoft's Visual Basic, or Powersoft's PowerBuilder. CA is beginning to build some market momentum for the Visual Objects tool, but OpenRoad has not yet realized its early potential as one of the first cross-platform development tools.
CA is still generating revenue from its acquisition of mainframe database products such as Cullinet's IDMS in 1989. However, the focus of CA's current database strategy is the CA-OpenIngres and newly announced Jasmine object database management system (ODBMS).
The Ingres RDBMS and the CA-OpenRoad cross-platform application development tool were added to the CA product portfolio when CA acquired the Ask Group in 1994. Ingres was then a sophisticated RDBMS with built-in data replication capabilities plus a gateway product for accessing data from other SQL and non-SQL databases. CA-OpenIngres has been joined by CA-OpenIngres/Desktop, a version of the popular SQLBase RDBMS licensed from Centura Software.
The combination of CA-OpenIngres on Unix servers and CA-OpenIngres/Desktop on laptops means that CA can offer a viable platform for mobile computing applications. The laptop database can replicate new and updated data to the server database and vice versa. This capability lets CA deliver a solution for applications such as distributed sales ordering, in which field sales reps capture orders on their laptops and transfer them to the main order-entry server via a wireless or modem link. The OpenIngres double act supports both asynchronous and synchronous replication to suit the needs of the application.
CA-OpenIngres has been given the ICE treatment. CA recently announced plans to embed the Spyglass HTTP Web server technology into every copy of CA-OpenIngres/ICE. The new Internet-enabled version of the Ingres RDBMS can publish database data in HTML pages to Internet browsers, reject resource-intensive Internet queries if current Web server loading demands it, alert users to specific database events across the Internet, and use its gateway product to extract data from non-OpenIngres data sources.
Although the latest trend has been to Internet-enable databases, CA has been quiet on relational database issues such as object extensions, parallel processing, data warehousing, and OLAP. CA-OpenIngres claims support for multimedia data through its Object Management Extension (OME) and for the management of spatial data through its Spatial Object Library, itself an extension of the OME. CA claims to be adding support to CA-OpenIngres for use on symmetrical multiprocessing systems, but there haven't been any major announcements about this recently. CA does have a warehouse management product, CA-Warehouse Boss, but this product is designed for managing physical warehouses rather than data warehouses. CA used to have a product called CA-Compete (an OLAP spreadsheet add-in that was merged into the CA-SuperCalc product in Europe) for multidimensional data analysis, but CA-Compete has disappeared much in the same way that Lotus Improv did. It is fair to say that CA is not the vendor to look to for your OLAP front-ended data warehouse running on massively parallel processing hardware.
Some 18 months ago, CA began work with Fujitsu on a new multimedia DBMS called Jasmine. The partners quickly realized that trying to create a hybrid object-relational architecture on top of the Ingres engine would not be effective. Instead they decided to concentrate on a pure multimedia database engine and development system and to continue with Ingres as the primary relational engine for online transaction processing. Essentially, CA has rejected the "universal server" approach espoused by both Informix and Oracle Corp.
The new Jasmine database fulfills three main design goals:
Intelligent handling of multimedia data includes: knowing how to render a complex image depending on the application platform accessing it, knowing how much of a file to display when asked to display 10 seconds of video from data stored in low- or high-resolution formats, and managing basic data animation in the client software in order to reduce the number of animation frames required for transferral from the server.
Internet awareness will be enabled via a plug-in module that allows Jasmine data to be displayed and manipulated through standard browsers such as Netscape. The idea is that pointing to a Jasmine multimedia data object will automatically display the data in the correct manner and provide the appropriate manipulation facilities from within the browser page. Access to non-Jasmine data, in either relational or nonrelational formats, is enabled via a set of SQL classes that let application developers combine Jasmine multimedia data with standard text and numeric data. The Jasmine feature set also includes:
Considering that only a few years ago almost all of CA's revenues came from mainframe-related products, the company has weathered the client/server storm rather well, especially relative to similarly positioned businesses in the applications sector such as Dun & Bradstreet Software, which has seen falling revenues and is now up for sale. Yet even CA has some lines of business that, considering the pace of the competition, might not remain competitive, such as application development tools and client/server accounting and manufacturing applications.
But CA has weathered the client/server storm. It is also quietly establishing a leadership position with its CA-Unicenter product in a key enterprise computing market: distributed information asset management. No other major player in the enterprise market, or enterprise solution provider wannabe such as Microsoft Corp., has a single product that matches Unicenter in scope. CA is being pragmatic in its Internet-enabling by working first on the applications in its portfolio for which Internet functionality makes business sense. CA has a solid offering in the relational database market, and the new Jasmine product gives it a head start in the multimedia database management market, which is still in its infancy. In my opinion, however, CA's vision of business information resource and process visualization is the jewel in the crown and could provide the propulsion needed to drive CA's business into the next century.
Year Company or Product Positioning 1984 SuperCalc Desktop spreadsheet 1986 Software International Minicomputer accounting 1987 UCCEL Mainframe utilities and banking software 1988 Applied Data Research Mainframe database 1989 Cullinet Mainframe database 1991 On-Line Software Mainframe utilities 1992 Nantucket Clipper xBase tools 1994 ASK Group Relational database and tools 1995 Legent Corp. Mainframe utilities
Product Name Positioning CA-Unicenter Enterprise information resource management CA-OpenIngres Relational DBMS CA-OpenRoad Cross-platform client/server application development tool CA-Visual Objects Desktop application development and GUI builder CA-Visual Realia COBOL application development tool CA-Masterpiece/2000 Cross-platform client/server accounting and distribution CA-ACCPAC/2000 LAN-based workgroup accounting and distribution CA-MANMAN/X Manufacturing applications suite CA-PRMS Manufacturing applications suite