Virtual Reality: CA confident of survival

It sounds like simple logic — if you want to emphasise the growing importance of virtualisation, don’t walk into a roomful of a few thousand people and alk about it yourself. Send in your ‘Second Life avatar’ instead, to set the stage for your speech and reflect over pretty much the same issues that you have to deal with. Point made, you walk in and take off from where ‘you’ left off. Needless to say, when John Swainson, CEO, CA tried this at the recently concluded CA World, the response was exactly what he wanted — people talking about virtualisation in its various forms over the next three days. “Virtualisation promises myriad benefits — from reduced costs, improved service quality and increased agility, to a smaller carbon footprint and reduced business risk — all acute concerns for business today,” he said. Of course, the doomsday predictions as to whether or not the $4.28 billion IT management software company would survive the downturn were top of mind for most people present , from clients to partners, analysts and naturally, journalists. But Swainson was quick to quell these. “Organisations around the world are striving to cut costs and become more efficient. At the same time, companies seek a competitive edge to ensure that they not only survive the current economic downturn, but emerge from it strong and thriving. Many companies look to IT to provide that competitive edge,” he said in his keynote speech, a thought that was echoed by the CA global senior management over the next few days. The three-day event also saw the launch of a range of new products and technologies, along with CA’s formal entry into the software-as-a-service (SAAS) market. Indeed the company expects to continue to grow in the future, and a large part of this growth is anticipated from the Asian markets, particularly India. “India is our fastest growing market at present with growth in strong doubledigits ,” points out Gavin Selkirk, corporate senior vp regional sales- Asia Pacific & Japan, CA. The Asia Pacific region currently accounts for 12% of CA’s turnover, and according to Selkirk, this will go up to 15% over the next few years with India, along with Japan, contributing significantly to this growth. That India is an important centre can be judged from CA’s recent announcement of an initial investment of $30 million to expand its existing facility in Hyderabad. This global R&D centre comes at a time when most companies are scaling back investments in most new ventures. The plan is to double the local headcount from the existing 1000 people over the next two-five years as this centre takes shape. “For India, we have put in place the ‘double-double strategy’ , which is to double our revenue every two years,” says Ninad Karpe, managing director, India & SAARC, CA.