John Swainson has taken on the challenge of his career.
After working at IBM for 26 years, last November Swainson was appointed president and CEO of Computer Associates, a 29-year-old company in need of an image makeover.
It's not that CA is in critical condition -- it's on solid financial footing and has thousands of large enterprise customers. Yet, the company needs a clean break with its past.
Accounting scandals forced out its former management staff, including former CEO Sanjay Kumar, who's been indicted on charges of financial fraud. Meanwhile, CA needs to continue mending a history of antagonistic customer relations.
It also needs focus. After swallowing up dozens of companies over nearly three decades, it has to home in on the areas where it's strong, namely systems management and security, according to Swainson. That means 'de-emphasising' a large proportion of its bulging product portfolio.
Finally, Swainson and his team have set out some fairly ambitious financial goals for CA in the coming year, including double-digit growth in some areas.
Swainson, who officially assumed responsibility earlier this month, spoke to ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com about CA's past and directing the company's future.
Q: CA has a bad reputation with some customers, which was being addressed even before you came. And there's also the accounting scandal. What do you think it's going to take for that cloud over the company to fade away?
A: Look at MCI (formerly WorldCom) or Enron. It takes a responsible management team coming in and demonstrating that they have corrected the systemic problems that led to the failings in the first place. And then they have to deliver. It takes years; it's not something where I think there are any shortcuts.
Why should customers give you a second chance if they were burned or had some bad experience?
CA, despite the fact that it may have had objectionable business practices, always had pretty good products. I think most customers recognise that it's tremendously disruptive to try and rip out the core of their infrastructure.
There are other alternatives to all of it, and if you really piss your customers off badly enough, they will go somewhere else. But I think that they have been hoping that we would address these problems, I think my coming on board has given them a little bit more hope.
One of the things I've been doing is running around the country telling them that we will fix the problems. We will address the issues and we will turn ourselves into the kind of partner they want to do business with. I'm deadly serious about that.
You've made some management changes already. Should we expect more?
Yeah. We will continue to refine our development organisational structure.
