CEOs are under increased pressure as the recession bites, and run the risk of making wrong IT investments that could be fatal for their businesses.
The warning came at the opening of CA World in Las Vegas, when the software company laid out its guide to survival.
Speaking at the event, Patrick Starck, senior vice-president and general manager for EMEA, said that mistakes around IT investment were now unrecoverable and could ‘kill a company’ unless organisations adopt the right approach.
“It has to be the right investment at the right time,” he said. “And if IT is not aligned with the business, then you won’t get the return that is expected.”
CA is the leader in IT management software and believes that its software gives CEOs the tools they need to address the priorities of the day, which Starck outlined as reducing IT costs, optimising IT investments and enabling better governance.
Rather than cut IT budgets, he argued that companies need to spend more at the same time as they cut their IT running costs, a strategy that can only be achieved by aligning IT with the business. He said the winners will be the companies that make the right investment and prepare for a future beyond the current downturn.
CEOs were given more think about when CA CEO John Swainson used his keynote speech to list six disruptive technologies that required a new approach to IT management.
Virtualisation, converged networks and service oriented architecture (SOA) were already here, he said, and would soon be joined by cloud computing, social networking in business and a proliferation of new IP-addressable devices that would present even more challenges for managing infrastructure.
“These technologies will change enterprise IT forever,” he said. “We have to learn how to manage them and still provide a consistent IT service to the business.”
He talked about the increasing complexity of IT and warned that the only chance of exercising any control over it was by automating and standardising the environment.
CA World was also used to highlight the company’s growing commitment to SaaS (software as a service) with the release of three new on-demand products, Clarity PPM, GRC Manager and Instant Recovery.
Speaking at the launch, senior vice-president Jules Ehrlich also announced that CA has set up a new on-demand business unit. The products were the first fruits of the new division, giving businesses the chance to buy CA software on a pay-as-you-go basis for as little as US$18 a month.
“Whether their business requirements are early stage or mature, customers will find it’s simple to access precisely the application functionality they need from one of the deepest and broadest IT management and governance portfolios in the industry,” Ehrlich said.
By Ian Campbell
