Computer Associates 2006 Annual Report Download - page 32

Technical Support is to provide our customers with industry leading support. We support our customers in the
following ways:
• CA Technical Support — staffed with a highly skilled customer response team, we manage more than 70
Technical Support centers in over 25 countries providing quality support online or over the telephone
regardless of customer location or language.
• SupportConnect — to help fully meet the needs of our customers, we provide online self-service resources.
More than 190,000 customers use these resources to review their account information, research technical
information, open and maintain incident reports, order and download products, and much more. Automated
self-service resources are convenient to our customers and are a means of controlling costs for CA.
• Support Availability Management (SAM) — supporting our customers sometimes requires a “personal
touch.” This service provides our customers with access to Support Availability Managers with
specialized skills in accessing information and resolving issues at a site level.
• Channel Partners Support Program — in line with CA’s drive to increase our channel partner presence and
sales, we believe CA channel partners should receive one of the best technical support programs in the
industry.
We believe that our dedicated staff, online services, segment-specific offerings, SAMs and channel partners support
program not only protect and enhance customer satisfaction today but also maintain customer loyalty to grow CA in
the future.
Business Model
Customers face challenges when trying to achieve their desired returns on software investments. These challenges
are compounded by traditional software pricing models that often force companies to make long-term commitments
for projected capacities. When these projections are inaccurate, the desired returns on investment may not be
achieved. Many companies are also concerned that, due to short product life cycles for some software products, new
products may become available before the end of their current software license agreement periods. In addition,
some companies, particularly those in new or evolving industries, want pricing structures that are linked to the
growth of their businesses to minimize the risks of overestimating capacity projections.
We believe we can service our customers better by offering more flexible licensing terms to help our customers
realize maximum value from their software investments. In October 2000, we formalized this philosophy and refer
to it as our business model.
Our business model offers customers a wide range of purchasing and payment options. Our flexible licensing terms
allow customers to license our software products for relatively short periods of time, including on a monthly basis.
Through these flexible licensing agreements, customers can evaluate whether our software meets their needs before
making larger commitments. As customers become more comfortable with their software investments, they
typically license our software for longer terms, generally up to three years.
Some customers prefer to choose cost certainty and sign longer-term agreements. Under our flexible licensing
terms, customers can license our software products under multi-year licenses, and most customers choose terms of
one to three years, although longer terms are sometimes selected. We provide our customers with the option to
change their product mix after an initial period of time to mitigate their risks. We also help customers reduce
uncertainty by providing a standard pricing schedule based on simple usage tiers.
We also offer software licenses to customers based on the value created from our customers’ business processes by
linking our pricing structure to the growth of our customers’ businesses. For example, an airline company may
choose to license our software based on the number of passenger miles flown during a defined period. Although this
practice is not widely utilized by our customers, we believe this metric-based approach is unique in the software
industry and can provide us with a competitive advantage.
As a result of the flexible licensing terms we offer our customers, specifically the right to receive unspecified future
upgrades for no additional fee, as well as maintenance included during the term of the license, we are required under
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