CA World 2007: CA to boost focus on mid market

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Businesses employing between 500 and 5,000 people will be an increasing focus for CA over the next 12 months, following the company's decision to create a business unit dedicated to the mid market.

The unit will be tasked with developing new products for medium-sized companies, adapting CA's existing offerings for the market, and selling storage software, including a new recovery management tool, also announced at CA World this week.

"We recognise that a company with 500 employees may not need the same infrastructure as Citibank and HSBC. So we have created a business unit to focus on creating, developing and acquiring software for these companies," said John Swainson, chief executive of CA.

The new organisation has been built around the existing storage business unit, although CA will continue to sell its storage software to enterprises. CA estimates that there are 66,000 companies worldwide with between 500 and 5,000 staff, with a total value in excess of $10 billion.

Some 80 per cent of CA's revenues currently come from sales to enterprises and government departments, and around 50 per cent from the mainframe. However, CA executives see greater opportunities for growth in the mid market.

Addressing the needs of smaller organisations - which typically have more limited in-house IT resources and are less willing to customise or develop their own software - demands a new approach.

Some businesses might, for example, want to buy technology as a managed service, rather than paying for an up-front licence fee. And even where companies do want to run the software themselves, they need a simpler and easier to manage set of applications, but with enterprise-strength capabilities.

"The needs of a mid-market company might not be that different to those of an enterprise. They have servers, networks, storage devices and applications, all the things that the enterprise has," said Anders Lofgren, head of strategy for mid-sized business at CA.

"They also have complexity in their IT architecture. But they expect the deployment to be different and they expect a different user interface and different pricing and licensing."

However, CA will not be producing "lite" versions of its existing software with stripped-down functionality, Lofgren said.

Instead, CA plans to develop specific products for the mid market using the new business unit's own dedicated development team. Products will be sold exclusively through CA's channel partners.

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