CA has entered into a "preferred alliance" with professional services provider Deloitte in the areas of governance, risk management and compliance, and is looking to expand the partnership across Asia.
The alliance, announced during the recent CA Expo '07 conference, is based on CA's technology and Deloitte's consulting skills, and follows a two-year relationship between both companies in Singapore, according to Brenton Smith, CA's managing director for Asia South.
Noting in an interview that the alliance would "help to open some doors", Smith said that CA would get an opportunity to sell its governance, risk and compliance solutions "a little higher up the chain" while Deloitte would have CA's software.
This would include offerings around governance and portfolio management based on its Niku and Clarity acquisitions, which would round out Deloitte's consulting solution, he said.
Deloitte has committed to 100 trained consultants to serve the alliance across the region over the next two years while plans include joint IT governance marketing and a fast-track certification program that has already seen 15 Deloitte professionals gain special accreditation as Deloitte/CA consultants.
The companies are expanding their partnership to cover the rest of CA's Asia South region, which includes Thailand, along with Malaysia and India, and the markets of greater China and Australia/New Zealand, with exploratory talks commencing in Japan.
Kicking off the day-long symposium last Wednesday, CA's recently-appointed manager for Thailand and Indochina Tanawut Sukanake, explained how businesses now depended on IT as source of innovation for competitive advantage and how CA's strategy and vision was around enterprise IT management (EITM), which could be regarded as "enterprise resource planning for IT."
CA announced this direction some two years ago with the aim to govern, manage and secure IT with the slogan "unify and simplify" and the concept of managing everything as an IT service and optimising IT infrastructure to ensure this.
"We feel like we're leading the way, by providing an integrated layer to bring all those points ... the 360 degrees of an IT service... together," Smith said. He added that CA's approach was to try to work with IT managers and CIOs to make their life a lot simpler, so they could put more of their budget, into the innovation side by easing the back-end stuff.
EITM was one way of doing that, he said.
Asked if he sensed that CIOs and CEOs were getting this message, Smith said that over a 30-year period CA had made a lot of acquisitions and had a lot of footprint, "so if we can just simplify the CA footprint without selling them anything else, then we've made a big inroad in simplifying their IT operation."
The products were all there, he said, but the integration around the unified services model needed to be finalised. "It's not live and kicking, all of it... we've got a lot to do this year. By the end of the year, which, for us, is in March, we'd like to think that we can go back to the market and get that message in next year that we have delivered on that integration," CA's regional chief said.
CA's unified services model used the CMDB (configuration management database) engine around integration, while the roll-out plan would be "security, and Clarity, for sure, and then Wily ... and then we'll roll out the other products as the year goes on," he said, adding that "the beauty is that if CA acquires another organisation, the integration of that product will be much easier."
Smith also indicated that CA would be putting much more emphasis on the partnership model and in providing incentives for good partners.
"We want the partner implementation piece of the pie to be bigger. So if we're going to sell US$1.1 billion in new software this year, we can't, under any circumstances, roll that out ourselves. We just don't have the ability to do that."
CA had teamed up with Deloitte, Cap Gemini and other local partners "to make sure that they have enough skills to offer," he said, adding the company would offer more incentives for good partners.
Several hundred IT managers attended the CA Expo conference which had the theme of "driving growth and innovation in the real world".
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