Spotlight

The soft side of infrastructure

Having created a presence in the enterprise segment, Computer Associates is now looking to make inroads among SMBs, finds Shivani Shinde

Since its entry into the Indian market in 1997, Computer Associates (CA) has been a leader in the software infrastructure space. It has about 1,200 products in its portfolio. Although known for infrastructure and management-based solutions and services, the company’s presence in India has extended to security and storage solutions.

The company was recently ranked number one by IDC India in the system management software category. According to IDC, the Indian system management market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 26 percent from 2003 to reach $71.9 million by 2008. IDC estimates that the Indian infrastructure management space grew by 20 percent in 2004, up from $13 million in 2003.

Similarly, analysts from Frost & Sullivan predict that the Indian network security market will exceed the projected growth rate of 32.4 percent in 2005. While the infrastructure management software market has grown at a rate of 15-20 percent, CA has been growing at the rate of 17 percent. The impetus is coming from the banking, retail and oil sectors as they are looking for large-scale expansion of their branches, which means that their networks are becoming increasingly complex—and this translates into a need for management software.

A solid foundation

In the overall security market we are still the leaders Ninad Karpe Managing Director Computer Associates India

Much has changed from the time that CA entered the Indian market as a subsidiary. The market has grown and matured with the arrival of several international players. Despite this, Ninad Karpe, Managing Director, Computer Associates, India, believes that CA is still the one providing integrated solutions and that its early start continues to give it an edge.

Karpe states that the market’s maturity can be gauged from the wide acceptance and usage of infrastructure management solutions in India. CA has a dominant presence in this space with Unicenter installed at over 150 sites. The company’s flagship brand Unicenter has been deployed in Punjab National Bank (PNB) and Hughes Software Systems (HSS). PNB chose CA’s Unicenter EMS solution for network and systems management to handle its entire network infrastructure.

HSS deployed Unicenter Network and Systems Management (NSM) at six sites, including the BPO division and the Bangalore development centre. One of the reasons that HSS decided to go for Unicenter was its ability to manage the health and availability of server infrastructure and monitor performance. Also, HSS has diverse platforms, and Unicenter helped them integrate server and desktop management. It required effective tools to monitor server performance in terms of CPU, memory and I/O utilisation. Unicenter allowed HSS to plan for future capacity requirements and undertake load balancing to properly allocate work among servers.

The other stronghold of the company has been its eTrust security solution management. To strengthen its position in the market, CA will implement eTrust at 55 centres of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) across the globe. This will encompass identity and access management, security command centre, SOC, perimeter solution for URL filtering and content filtering.

TCS will deploy CA’s security solution to cover almost 30,000 employees. “The idea behind this is that TCS, by applying our solution, will have a good understanding of it, and we can then pitch for other enterprises,” adds Karpe.

“Given the criticality of our business and the need for global delivery, we wanted to have a partner who could provide us global support and deliver a solution that is robust, integrated and expandable, and can support multiple platforms,” says K Ananth Krishnan, Vice-president, TCS.

Identity management (IM) is yet other segment that CA wants to tap. Though they are in a dominant position, Karpe is of the view that the Indian market is still warming up to the idea of IM. “If you restrict yourself to IM then there are many players. In the overall security market we are still the leaders,” states Karpe.

Inorganic route

The SMB segment is going to be an area that everybody will have to pay attention to in the future Pravir Arora Director, Marketing India & Saarc Computer Associates

Globally, CA has taken the inorganic route to grow by acquiring companies time and again. It recently acquired Netegrity and PestPatrol, organisations that specialise in anti-spam, anti-virus and spyware solutions. “Although the market for spyware solutions is still at a nascent stage in India, these acquisitions complete our story in the area of Web-based security,” says Karpe. He also believes that this will give them the lead in providing security solutions. They realise that many Indian companies still prefer to have solutions in bits-and-pieces rather than go in for an entire solution. However, the company is building awareness for adopting solutions that can scale over time.

One of the initiatives is its recent announcement wherein it entered into an alliance with Chitkara Institute of Engineering and Technology, Chandigarh. The alliance will allow engineering students to take CA’s Unicenter NSM course in addition to their regular curriculum. The course will prepare them to take the Certified Unicenter Systems Engineering test by the time they graduate. CA has also tried to make inroads in storage management. If Unicenter is aimed at the enterprise level, ArcServe is targeted at the SMB segment.

Similarly, the recent tie-up between CA and Satyam allows CA to provide better service to its enterprise clients. According to the agreement, Satyam will provide a full range of business process management (BPM) assessment, consulting and implementation services to users of CA’s CleverPath Aion solutions. The CleverPath Aion Business Process Manager and CleverPath Aion Business Rules Expert support the optimisation of business processes. Last year also saw CA open source its Ingres database. While CA stands to lose licence revenues, the company is hoping that increased adoption of Ingres will help it sell other products in its portfolio. It may also gain if companies that have deployed open source Ingres come back for support. An additional benefit is that CA can hope to add more features through the efforts of volunteers. Says Karpe, “Ingres can seamlessly integrate with other applications and data in a varied environment. This will be significant as Linux becomes more prevalent in enterprise IT environments.”

Channelling resources

Taking the channel route is the best way of catering to SMBs. CA has adopted a similar strategy. With high competition and increasing demand in the market, a sound channel strategy is a must. When they started in India, CA had just two distributors and two partners; their partner strength has now gone up to 65. With almost 90 percent of the company’s business being generated through channels, their role in securing business becomes crucial.

Says Pravir Arora, Director, Marketing, India and SAARC, CA, “The SMB segment is going to be an area that everybody will have to pay attention to in the future.” CA has come out with a special bundle of IM for SMBs that is priced at Rs 2.99 lakh, and it expects 20 new installations by end-2005. The company also anticipates that the typical SMB will use IM for network management, including intrusion detection, network usage and bandwidth management—hence there is no need to offer the complete stack. Vishaka Industries, Kribhco, Shamrao Vithal Bank and Bharat Co-operative Bank are some of CA’s customers for its SMB offering.

Hyderabad centre

Although many Indian corporates have invested in building IT infrastructure, they have not done much for managing the infrastructure; CA can tap this for further growth. Also, the company’s India Development Centre at Hyderabad is contributing significantly to its global operations. This centre is focussing on core corporate initiatives such as management software, on demand computing, wireless, and Web services. Reveals Karpe, “It will be a hub for all areas of development, not just specific technology development.”

The company has been able to create an impressive client list with names like ICICI, HDFC Bank, UTI Bank, HSS, and Shamrao Vithal Bank. The verticals that they plan to target are e-governance, BFSI, telecom and healthcare. Karpe believes that with increasing investments from governments in automating their departments, they will also need networking solutions, which means they will require products such as CA’s management solutions.

With a finger in every pie, CA is hoping that its strategy of being a one-stop-shop for management software bears fruit in a market that is still wising up to this concept.

shivani@expresscomputeronline.com