Ca Technologies: Bringing the Cloud to Earth

CA Technologies: Bringing the Cloud to Earth.

In 1996 at a time when Information Technology Management was challenge by the lack of secure and protected master data files, Charles B. Wang and Russ Artzt, fellow Queens College graduates founded CA Technologies. Mr Wang, the savviest businessman of the two, encourage a competitive internal culture, together with long working hours which helped the company achieve $5M within a year in business. After taking the company public in 1981 CA Technologies focus on developing mainframe software that streamlined and automated mainframe operation, lowering cost and freeing IT staff to work on more strategic projects. CA Technologies mission at this point was to always pursue an aggressive growth strategy based on internal development and acquisitions. By the late 1980's they accomplished either the number one or two market share position in many segments of software products to include security management. By 1989 and with the acquisition of Uccel Corporation early on, CA Technologies became the largest independent vendor of mainframe infrastructure software with an impressive revenue north of $1 Billion. By the mid-1990 they continued to expand to global territories by going into Asia, Africa and Latin America and formed a unique an interesting partnership with both Microsoft and Netscape at the time when the two firms were in a battle for dominance in the browser wars. By 2001 the company find themselves in a string of accounting scandals that shaken upper management. In 2005 and with a new CEO in place CA Technologies unveiled a new logo, launched a global branding program and released a string of new versions and products, and completed a set of acquisitions that reinforce the company position and capabilities. Later on they change their name to CA Inc and identify themselves as having the ability to unify elements of IT and simplify complex of IT Management. Many years later the name was changed again to CA Technologies which remains presently.

In evaluating CA Technologies move to the cloud service provision it is demonstrated they have made a series of acquisitions over the years of several cloud-based companies, marking their intention to be a major cloud player and partner. They are levering those deals to step up as a full-fledged cloud service provider, offering products, services and partnerships to help businesses move to the cloud through a variety of software lifecycle management and automation services. They have spent more than $1 billion in the last two years on acquisitions. They have also expanded into out of suite cloud products and services, first with CA World then into cloud application developer environment with Cloud Commos Ecosystem Marketplace and developer Studio. They are clearly trying to compete against giants like IBM, Amazon, Microsoft and Google. They are robustly acquiring several cloud services offering companies hoping to capitalize in small startups innovations. They realize that for bigger companies innovations are not easily accomplished therefore they are hoping to take advantage of smaller companies' ideas and grow upon those ideas. This is easily said than done. I believed that CA Technologies will have a challenge aligning and incorporating all the companies they have acquired and spreading their corporate culture through the corporation. With mergers you lose employees, positions are overstaffed and people do