It seems that Computer Associates International Inc got more than it bargained for last week when it started offering severance pay to employees at its Ask/Ingres acquisition, and a lot more staff than expected took up its offer. Sources indicate that the Islandia, New York-company wanted to get rid of between 25% and 30% of Ask/Ingres employees, mainly in support services and administration, and sent out termination notices early last week to some 150 people whose functions were deemed redundant, including all 15 upper management staff. Other former Ask employees, including some software developers, received ‘transition’ notices, offering them new positions. Redundancy pay of up to six months was offered whether staff were fired or chose to resign, but Computer Associates was said to be shocked when both important engineering and sales staff, particularly on the Ingres side, decided they were more interested in the cash, rather than the job. Speculation on the Internet and elsewhere was that the firm was heavy-handed in its tactics as a way to cut payroll without having to lay people off explicitly. Maybe it serves to cull out those who wouldn’t fit into Computer Associates’s way of operating. The big loss of support could cause problems for users – as one spectator said A relational database isn’t a simple product; you can’t just bring in new hires to maintain it. If they lose most of their competent engineers, the loss may be irreversible.
Software is an annoying nuisance
Computer Associates said numbers being touted were ‘grossly inflated’, and that only about 100 or so staff walked out. Chairman and chief executive Charles Wang took the stance Alameda did not go well, but we will rebuild that, adding that the situation is not as serious as it could have been, as Ask started moving its development from Alameda to the UK quite a while ago. The meeting to announce the ICL Plc agreement (CI No 2,449) was dominated by a barrage of questions about the future of Ingres and how the Computer Associates takeover will impact on Ingres customers, including many ICL customers with Ingres databases – and Wang was there to field them. He believed Ingres had a long way to go, but had been able to give assurances to allay ICL chief Peter Bonfield’s anxieties. On the acquisition of Ask, he said the Santa Clara and Santa Rosa sites had put out banners welcoming Computer Associates. Wang was more than adamant that nothing at Alameda would affect the acquisition and that business would soon return to normal – we did not buy the company to trash the products and customers. Beyond this, he was unwilling to expand, commenting, I don’t want this to become an Ingres press conference. Computer Associates also refuted allegations that it simply wanted to milk its purchase of the Ingres database for maintenance revenues, saying that it was committed to developing it further and had a white paper ready on future directions for both this and Ask’s ManMan/X manufacturing application suite. UK database analyst Martin Butler compared the situation to the Cullinet debacle, however. It’s Cullinet replayed. They lost more or less everything from Cullinet, milked the maintenance and support revenues, while support was very thin on the ground. They know it takes five to 10 years to get out of a product line. Computer Associates is basically a financial animal: software is an annoying nuisance, he declared. The jewel in the crown for Computer Associates was the ManMan manufacturing package and the tools, he added, stating that the news was disastrous for ICL. As a team, ICL and Ingres made very deep in-roads into the public sector. ICL has effectively lost its partner. But Charles Wang sees in the ICL agreement a ‘new level of collaboration’ that will enable the companies to leverage off respective customer bases with a protected route forward for both companies. The agreement also means that ICL will contribute technology to enhance the functionality of future releases of CA-Unicenter. These enhancements will be available to al
l Computer Associates customers. This represents a coming together of ICL’s Open Systems Management Centre with CA-Unicenter; total convergence will come later. The agreement represents another important step for ICL and TeamOffice, as it now sells and licenses software to the world’s three largest software companies, Microsoft Corp, Novell Inc and Computer Associates, and Bonfield regards it as a ‘win-win’ situation. The functionality extensions to Unicenter are intended to meet the future needs of all ICL customers, including those using VME and Goldrush, the company noted.
