Mike Gregoire (Photo Credit: CA Technologies)
A recent headline in Bloomberg declared CA’s New CEO Jolting Old Guard With Silicon Valley Moxie. As someone who founded a company acquired by CA Technologies, I am very interested to see what changes new CEO Mike Gregoire will introduce there. After spending six months on the inside of CA, I was impressed with the assets the company has at their disposal. The business has great potential but will need a complete overhaul to be effective. After acquiring so many assets over the years, there is a clear lack of vision or purpose to unite the thousands of employees.
The starting point for this transformation will be communicating a clear vision of where Mike believes the company should go. Then he will have to make sure he has the right people in the right seats on the bus to compete in the market. I look forward to hearing from my friends at CA how the rebirth is going.
Thanks Joel for sharing your thoughts–it’s time for action, no doubt. I agree that we can, with the right focus and vision, leverage the power of our customer relationship and somewhat idle intellectual property to bring disproportionate value to our customers. There are some unbelievable innovative gems that are ready to shine–it’s time to fund and capitalize on them!
Joel, I agree with your assessment as well. When people ask me about CA I’ve always described it as “a place where good software goes to die.” Hopefully Mike will be able to change that.
I’ve heard that too Chris, and there is more than a small element of truth to it. Here’s the issue, coming from an acquisition company (Hyperformix). When we’re acquired, we’ve been trading on the future–rapid innovation backed by investors and guided both by customers and market trends. Many of the non-functional “requirements” (internationalization/localization, massive performance/scalability, special-needs UI, etc.) were simply not considered. Coming into CA, there is a movement to turn those into hard requirements while integrating with other products/platforms. My strategy has been to largely ignore anything that was not required for either disruptive innovation or specific customer needs. It hasn’t always made me tremendously popular, but our results have been impressive. Capacity Management continues to innovate and scale both from a product development and sales aspect–much more so when we were a small company. I’m choosing to see Mike’s message as a reinforcement of this behavior, and I might just take it up another notch. Next on my radar, getting the former NetQoS products to the same level–part of my new (fiscal) year’s resolution!
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