One of the few instances of no news being good news must be when Computer Associates International Inc buys a software supplier and its users don’t hear of changes being made to channel, products or support. Such is the case with CA’s December 1996 purchase of Cheyenne Software. When we first reported on the acquisition, Cheyenne users’ primary concern was that the deal would mirror every other CA purchase – products would be dropped or receive little further investment, and support would deteriorate as CA reduced overheads by laying off Cheyenne personnel. Some eight months on, these concerns seem to have evaporated as the company begins delivering on goals, without making any radical changes to the Cheyenne organization or product line up. The raison d’etre behind this acquisition was to beef up Unicenter’s local area network management and back-up options by integrating Cheyenne’s ARCServe product into Unicenter. We expressed concern that this would not be an easy or swift task, given the already somewhat composite nature of the flagship systems management package. However, CA executives now tell us that the integration effort is `nearly complete’ – and that the link between ARCServe and Unicenter is much deeper than a mere API. ARCServe is integrated with Unicenter at the repository and SNMP protocol level, Marc Sokol, senior vice president of Advanced Technology at the company told us. The result, he says, is an object-oriented backup system that can handle line-of-business systems, databases, groupware and web pages, as well as traditional file systems, by searching out the various data types and automatically backing them up.
By Krishna Roy
CA first launched modules for the Unicenter/ARCServe combine back in June last year, prior to the Cheyenne purchase. The first of these was a CA-Unicenter Advanced Storage Option which backed up applications that were either online or currently in use. Users visualized, managed and set policy for backing up data using the Unicenter-TNG interface. CA then extended TNG backup capabilities to all other applications resident on the desktop through products such as Cheyenne Disaster Recovery for Windows NT, which provides hardware and operating system configuration information to intelligent wizards that automate all the steps required for basic recovery. The final piece of the backup jigsaw came when CA added the business object storage specification (BOSS) to the TNG software developers’ kit, to enable third-party developers to use Unicenter storage management extensions in their own applications. ARCServe for NT has proved the prime purchase from the acquisition, with sales flourishing as a result of the high uptake in NT systems, Sokol told us. He would not, however, divulge any numbers. The Cheyenne division was one of the first to provide a disaster recovery disk and directory manager for Windows NT and as a result has been able to leverage sales in, what was then, a relatively uncrowded market. CA released the latest version of ARCServe for NT and its single-server counterpart in June 1997, halving the price of the former to $149 in an effort to match the price of rival products in what has since become a highly competitive niche. The NT version now also includes a recovery module and comes with an integrated copy of the InocuLAN virus checker and support for a larger number of disk drives including Iomega’s Jaz and Zip, Syquest, and Power Drive. As we predicted, CA is also leveraging the Cheyenne sales channel to increase sales of Unicenter into Cheyenne accounts. The company has put in place a training scheme under which Cheyenne VARs can become qualified Unicenter sales representatives, although the transition to selling a complex systems management product such as Unicenter is not one that everyone will make. Unicenter sales staff will undoubtedly have found it easier to adapt to selling the off-the-shelf cheaper software packages which have been Cheyenne’s forte. Again, this has proved to be the case. Channel management seems to have been the main stumbling block for CA in managing this acquisition. In the first few months after the deal had closed, we were hearing that Cheyenne resellers were feeling left in the dark as to what CA had planned for them. However, these seem to have been teething problems, and for now the two sales forces appear to be co-existing peacefully enough.
A few hiccups
A fresh avenue of business appeared last month when CA announced that it had signed OEM agreements with several of the large systems vendors such as Tandem, Unisys, Digital Equipment and Hewlett-Packard. Under the terms of the agreement, core Unicenter-TNG components, such as virus detection, event management and automatic error and problem discovery, can be integrated with these vendors’ own systems. Although this is not a direct revenue generator, as royalties to CA will be minimal, all OEMs which bundle the TNG components have agreed to give CA sales lead data, so it may bolster its indirect sales strategy. All in all, apart from a few hiccups in its channel management strategy, Cheyenne users have not witnessed the now legendary CA treatment. Business seems to be proceeding smoothly in what must be a first for CA. This article originally appeared in our sister paper Mergers and Acquisitions.
