Computer Associates 2015 Annual Report Download - page 12

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Customer Success
The Customer Success organization is made up of customer advocates, technical support engineers, community managers
and an advanced customer data analytics team that together have one common goal: To deliver a superior end-to-end
customer experience for customers and partners that creates and sustains satisfaction and loyalty, and serves as a source of
competitive advantage for CA Technologies.
The Customer Success teams work with customers to understand their unique business challenges to help maximize the
value of their current investments. The Customer Success team aligns with members from education, support, services,
partners and development to drive customer adoption, facilitate product expansion and to provide maximum return in
minimal time.
CA Support engineers work with customers post-sale to assist in migration and upgrades, resolve issues 24/7, and create
self-help knowledge documentation. CA Support operates in 24 locations worldwide, providing assistance in nine languages
while consistently earning industry-leading customer satisfaction ratings.
Throughout the customer experience, customers are encouraged to join the online communities to interact and engage with
their peers, partners, and CA Technologies experts. We have more than 40,000 community members in over 40 communities
who network, ask and answer questions, and share knowledge about our solutions.
Research and Development
We have approximately 5,100 employees globally who design, develop, and support CA Technologies software. We operate
principal research and development centers in Islandia, New York; Framingham, Massachusetts; Santa Clara, California;
Prague, Czech Republic; as well as Hyderabad and Bangalore, India.
In fiscal 2015, research and development focused on three main areas: leveraging technological advances and market forces
to ensure our products continue to be market leading; adapting our products to modern expectations of usability; and
increasing quality and stability in our broadly deployed products so that we could generate capacity to focus on innovation
initiatives.
We continue to advance our DevOps, Management Cloud and Security solutions while driving a SaaS model across several
of our product lines, including security, management cloud, mobility and monitoring. We are making strides towards our
SaaS-first development approach through a targeted set of releases to build a SaaS platform and capabilities that makes it
easier for new solutions to be built.
Our research and development activities also include a number of efforts to support our technical community in its pursuit
of leading solutions for customers. We continue to use CA Technologies Labs and CA University Relations to strengthen
our relationships with research communities by working with academia, professional associations, industry standards bodies,
customers, and partners to explore novel products and emerging technologies.
We have charged to operations $603 million, $574 million, and $483 million in fiscal 2015, 2014 and 2013, respectively, for
product development and enhancements. In fiscal 2014 and 2013, we capitalized costs of $40 million and $156 million
respectively, for internally developed software. In fiscal 2015, we did not have capitalized costs for internally developed
software.
Our product offerings and go-to-market strategy continue to evolve to include solutions and product suites that may be
delivered either on-premise or via SaaS or cloud platforms. We expect our product offerings to continue to become
available to customers at more frequent intervals than our historical release cycles. Over the last few years, we have
continued to leverage Agile development methodologies, which are characterized by a more dynamic development process
with more frequent revisions to a product release’s features and functions as the software is being developed. In addition,
we have implemented a holistic portfolio management process, which has improved transparency and efficiency across the
portfolio through a quarterly cadence of business reviews. Due to these factors, we have commenced capitalization much
later in the development life cycle. As a result, product development and enhancements expenses have increased as the
amount capitalized for internally developed software costs has decreased.
Intellectual Property
Our products and technology are generally proprietary. We rely on U.S. and foreign intellectual property laws, including
patent, copyright, trademark and trade secret laws, to protect our proprietary rights. However, the extent and duration of
protection given to different types of intellectual property rights vary under different countries’ legal systems. In some
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