Computer Associates 2006 Annual Report Download - page 18

ahead continue to be positive. As the overall leader
in enterprise IT management, CA is already taking
advantage of this market growth.
Customers of enterprise IT management software
have changed the way they acquire technology, and
increasingly are looking for integrated suites rather
than products. In other words, they want solutions
that drive their business forward, rather than just a
piece of technology that fi xes an immediate problem.
Accordingly, customers are looking for a technology
partner who can help them meet the challenges of
today — as well as the challenges they will face down
the road. They want a partner, not merely a technol-
ogy vendor. We recognize that this trend can work to
CA’s advantage, but only if we build the right prod-
ucts and build the right relationships.
We embark on FY2007 moving decisively to do just
that and to achieve our goal of “Transforming the way
the world manages Information Technology.”
At CA, we recognize that over the last 50 years, infor-
mation technology has evolved from a tool for back
offi ce automation to an essential enabler of the entire
business. However, we also understand that this has
not been a simple, linear progression. New technol-
ogy co-exists alongside the old, with the result that
IT operations have become increasingly complex and
expensive to run, built with technology from many
generations and many different hardware and soft-
ware vendors.
Until now, nobody has been able to create a simplifi ed
and unifi ed vision of the IT infrastructure — one that
allows an organization an end-to-end view, and pro-
vides assurance that it is being managed and secured
effi ciently and effectively. Further, it has been diffi cult
until now to ensure that the business priorities and IT
priorities are well aligned. CA is unique in the soft-
ware industry in that we are completely dedicated to
solving this problem.
Staying Focused on Our Priorities
A year ago in this letter, I outlined for you a set of
six priorities that would drive our company’s trans-
formation, enable growth and ensure that we deliver
on our vision to transform the way the world man-
ages IT. One year later, I am pleased to report that
CA’s transformation is well under way with progress
in each one of our priorities.
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Our fi rst priority is to rebuild our relation-
ships with our customers.
It goes without saying that a strong position of trust
is essential to broadening our business relationships
with new and existing customers.
Moreover, as the software industry consolidates, we
expect to see our customers seek to create a smaller
number of more strategic partnerships with their
vendors. We believe that it is critical to be our cus-
tomers’ management and security partner.
Today, CA does business with many of the largest
companies in the world. Customers tell us that while
we have great products and great people, we need
to spend more time understanding their IT prob-
lems, to better ensure that our offerings meet their
needs. They also tell us that we need to focus more
on the future, and less on the past. Finally, they tell
us we need to talk to them in terms that are relevant
to their industry. Our challenge is to change the way
they think of us: from a mainframe software vendor
to a business partner who is instrumental to helping
them run or manage all of their IT operations.
We’ve responded to these customer insights over
the last year by increasing the number of Account
Directors — strong, client-focused sales executives
who play a strategic role for CA by developing deep
knowledge and understanding of a customer’s busi-
ness, representing all of CA’s products, and taking
a long-term view of opportunities. We now have
almost 300 Account Directors, with substantially
upgraded skills. We changed the commission plans
to focus on new business that provides added value
to customers, and introduced industry verticals in
Telco, Government and Financial Services. All of
these enhancements have contributed to a renewed
sense of customer confi dence, which in turn has led
to an improvement in the “likeliness to recommend”
metric on our most recent customer survey.
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Our second priority is to focus our invest-
ments on growing the business.
Shortly after I joined CA in November of 2004, I
undertook an exhaustive review of CA’s business
strategy. After talking to hundreds of customers
about their unmet IT needs, I came to realize that
CA’s biggest growth opportunity was to focus on
doing what it had done since its founding: provide
tools for managing IT.
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