Revisiting CA Technologies— What Does it Stand For

Even as the news about CA Technologies being acquired by Broadcom for $18.9 B cash is trickling in, I thought of revisiting what CA Technologies is all about. One would wonder whether the current positioning would continue after the acquisition.  As any tech company, CA Technologies is betting big on digital transformation.

CA Technologies is a legendary American soup-to-nuts enterprise software company that has undergone many transformations along with trials and tribulations. The company still eludes a clear categorization (at least to this writer) because of its broad scope---  it sells mainframe software, IT management software, security software, release automation software, application performance management software, and much more.

Sunil Manglore, Managing Director- India, CA Technologies

In my previous interactions with Sunil Manglore, Managing Director- India, CA Technologies, I got very good insight into what the company does and the opportunities it is chasing. Following are selected parts from the conversation where Sunil details out the concept of ‘software factory’ :

Software is the business “Software is the heart of every business today. Business needs to be rewritten by software. Software plays an increasingly important part in defining business outcomes in helping build strategies and execute strategies, then it’s important that the way that organizations build software and deliver it, replicates or mimics a production system. "

The ‘factory’ principle “The IT function and business functions need to create a development and delivery system that mimics production, a modern production system, built on the principles of high resource utilization, using the resources efficiently, high throughput, low errors and so on. That’s where we’ve come in with this concept of building, helping organizations build modern software factories.”

Business agility “When we are building modern software factories, we say that the software factory will help the organization be agile. Help build software applications and delivers outcomes through agile teams that work collaboratively and iteratively with the business and end customers who delivers the outcomes.”

Automation “Automation is also a very key part of our modern software factory. Benefits of automation are speed, reduction of errors compared to manual systems, lower costs and helping deliver value for the customer.”

Data “Another key component of our modern software factory are the data driven insights that we help our customers get. So, all the data that the software and the devices used by the organization and its employees, throws up a lot of data, which when analyzed gives lot of interesting insights that organizations can then use to deliver better, faster outcomes.”

Security “Inherent to all this is the fact that organizations have to use software as the center of their business, expose the data to the outside world, then get connected to their customers. They also need security. So, we have solutions that help build security within the development process itself. So that’s broadly the concept of the software factory that we are talking about building for our customers.”

IT-Business-DevOps “When we are talking about dev-ops now, on the ops side of dev-ops it continues to remain the CIO and the IT teams. On the dev side, more of the business gets involved because it means at times re-architecting some of the solutions that they have for which business needs to define the requirements. If there is an API solution that we are delivering as a part of our effort at transforming or building a software factory within the organization, then the business needs to take a call on what outcomes they expect.”