You competed with CA a bit when you were at IBM. What mistakes did CA make over the years?
I think fundamentally it didn't build a modern management infrastructure. It was very much a founder-led company for a very long time. Charles [Wang] was a brilliant guy; he founded this company and was extremely successful in growing it. Sanjay [Kumar] was clearly brought up in that same school. But along the way, the company sort of grew to $4bn and 15,000 employees. CA didn't necessarily have the structures, controls, management and business systems in place that it should have had. That eventually allowed some unscrupulous individuals to actually manipulate the system, in my opinion.
So what mistakes did CA make? One was not investing in the infrastructure as a group. The second one was creating an overly confrontational environment with its customers. And while that has been addressed -- and Sanjay started to change that -- it takes a long time to get out of that mode.
Your first order of business was to look at the product strategy. CA's product portfolio is huge and it's diverse. Do you think the company needs to focus better on what, exactly, it does?
Absolutely. I think that it got huge kind of by accident. I don't think anyone set out to say, "Let's see if we can acquire one product in every category in the industry." On the other hand, when you build a company through acquisition, like we did, that kind of naturally happens. Along the way, people normally do some pruning... and we didn't do much of that pruning until recently.
With my coming in, I asked embarrassing questions like: What do we do? What do we want to be when we grow up? And how can we possibly do all these things well? And the answer to [the last] is we can't and we shouldn't. So we need to focus on a smaller number of things and do them really, really well.
You've done the review of the parts by now. So what's the good, the bad and the ugly?
The market is a tremendously efficient thing because it tends to winnow out pretty quickly the ugly and make it noneconomic.
There are about 1,000 or so products that we have. Probably more than half of them are not really current anymore.
Some of our products, like systems management and security products, have a big installed base and are very strategic for us. Those are the things we want to really concentrate on and do well.
Can we expect more acquisitions in those areas?
Yeah. We're trying to basically build on strength... We need to do some targeted acquisitions as we did with Netegrity in the identity-management space. I think we have an opportunity to significantly grow our market share and have the industry grow with us.
