CA wants more business, more partners

Vendor is "wide open" to dealing with more partners, says MD

By Vera Alves and Randal Jackson, Auckland | Friday, 01 March 2013
CA Technologies says it is committed to investing in the New Zealand market and wants to work closely with local partners.

The company brought its CA Technologies Expo to two New Zealand locations, Wellington and Auckland, after presenting to partners in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Perth.

"We're doing two out of six [expos] in New Zealand. That is the strength of our commitment to the New Zealand marketplace," says Bill McMurray, CA Technologies' managing director for Australia and New Zealand, who visited the country for the expos.

For McMurray, the key is to hear from partners and figure out how to grow their business, particularly "how to get partners into big organisations because that is how they make money".

McMurray says the IT industry as a whole is going through a period of great transformation. "This is the first time ever that I have seen every organisation in every sector with the same priority: reduction of costs," he says.

The challenges are as big as the opportunities and the company says it is "wide open to dealing with more partners" in New Zealand, partners who can help customers drive IT innovation. McMurray points out that 80 percent of IT budgets are being spent "just on keeping the lights on" and companies need to "prioritise the other 20 percent for innovation". "They need to do things cheaper, faster, better, and with less risk," he adds.

CA says it is placing a strong focus on training partners so they can become trusted advisors and service providers who can talk to customers about CA solutions, as well as package CA products with others that they represent. "Enterprise-grade software is not simple - that is why we need partners," he says. CA Technologies provides free online training for both new and existing partners.

McMurray says that finding the right partners in New Zealand is crucial, as many of them already have a strong footprint in the country that CA can leverage.

According to Australian-based CTO for CA Technologies, Carl Terrantroy, the New Zealand market is very like that of Australia. But because of scale, the company is more focused on using service providers.

“New Zealand is effectively a 100 percent channel model,” he says. The local subsidiary has just three staff where some years ago it had more than 50.

Partners include Datacom, Fujitsu, Gen-i, Planwell,  Activate NZ and Weston.

“We brought Weston on board because they are a broad-based distie.”

Terrantroy says that in some countries in Asia, CA has adopted a different strategy where it is represented by other companies as business partners.

“They are the public face of the business and they drive the go-to-market strategy. We launched this model in the last fiscal year.”

Being hardware-agnostic is one of the vendor's key differentiators. Customers that already own hardware do not need to throw away that investment, as the CA solution will work on what they already have.

The vendor described the expos in Wellington and Auckland as a success, with over 100 attendees in both locations and a number of "walk ins" on the day, resulting in "a good mix of partners and customers".

"Partner-influenced business is approximately 50 percent. We would like to see that 50 percent go directly through partners."

Lourens Strydom, the company's Wellington-based channel account director, agrees that the synergy with partners is one of the company's priorities. "It's important to work closely with partners. They have ideas we haven't had yet."

Among the products that CA is making a priority in New Zealand is CA Lisa (the result of the acquisition of ITKO by CA Technologies back in 2011). Lisa is a service virtualisation solution that allows customers to create virtual models to simulate downstream dependencies in a 24/7, on-demand development and test lab environment. According to the company, Lisa can save companies 20 to 30 percent of the total IT application test and development budget. "It is not a testing tool per se, it is a virtualisation tool to allow testing," says McMurray.
He adds that the company is placing a "huge investment in Lisa in New Zealand". "It is a very significant drawcard for partners."

The premise behind Lisa is to virtualise everything, to eliminate constraints when modeling complex applications.

Eighty percent of all new applications are composite and highly integrated.

The vendor has recently reduced the entry-level price of LISA by around one third.

Globally, the service virtualisation market is thought to be worth around $US70 billion. Terrantroy says New Zealand customers are also big on application performance monitoring.

Service assurance, security, and portfolio management are three other areas the company is going to focus on in New Zealand. "We want business to go through partners, we want more partners," says McMurray.