News

CA Taps Bill McCracken As New CEO

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• January 29, 2010

Following a five-month search to replace retiring CEO John Swainson, CA yesterday dug into its ranks, naming its chairman William McCracken to run the company.

McCracken, like his predecessor, spent more than three decades at IBM. Swainson recruited his protégé McCracken in 2005 and he was named chairman in 2007. McCracken became executive chairman in September upon Swainson's retirement.

The news of McCracken's appointment came as CA announced that its first quarter revenues of $1.1 billion were up 8 percent over the same period last year, or 4 percent adjusted for currency changes. Profits were up 24 percent, or 21 percent, respectively.

By choosing McCracken, CA's board is indicating it will continue along Swainson's path. The company is looking to position itself as a provider of system, network and application performance management tools for data centers, with a focus on virtualization and cloud computing.

"Over the last five months, I've gotten a chance to see it up close with this team and focus in more on the market opportunities we're driving at, like cloud, like virtualization management, and I think it just has us positioned perfectly for where we want to go for the opportunity and it builds off of where we've been," McCracken said during the earnings call.

"He has tall shoes to fill coming after John Swainson who performed a miraculous turnaround and transformation at the company," said Ovum analyst Tony Baer. Forrester Research analyst Glenn O'Donnell agreed. “Swainson turned that company around," O'Donnell said. "He took it over when it was in its darkest days."

O'Donnell said CA's revenue and profits looked positive. While mainframe-related products remained its largest contributor, the company also reported strong growth in tools for distributed computing environments. McCracken said

CA reported record bookings for its identity management solutions, its Clarity portfolio management offering, and its application performance management business. Among the biggest selling products in the quarter for its distributed computing platforms were its application lifecycle management tools.