America: Interview with John Swainson, CA's new CEO
By Matt Hamblen; Computerworld (US online)
John Swainson, who was named CEO-elect of Computer Associates International Inc. last week, spoke with Computerworld reporter Matt Hamblen about his new post, the decision to hold CA World next year after all, his review of CA management products and ethics reforms at CA. Excerpts from that interview follow:
? What's it feel like to leave IBM after 26 years and suddenly be CEO-elect of a major software company?
S: It's a little daunting. You come in and know nothing and nobody ... having arrived from an environment where you know everybody and everything. You are allowed to have that ignorance for 24 hours. It's a little intimidating. I'm delighted to work with the CA team, and it's a great team and very durable. (...) My job is to shape an evolutionary path of growth after several years of arrested development.
? Are customers concerned about the legal problems that CA mostly settled in late summer?
S: The past is past, and I separate customer (relationships) from some of our legal problems. I'm a very customer-focused guy, and if customers bring up our relationship as a problem, we have broken customer trust. I am not yet in the position to assess customer relationships. I'm not so naive that we don't have to deal with how customers see us. (...)
? I'm sure you've heard customer attitudes about CA even while you were at IBM Corp. What are their feelings about CA?
S: CA customers are relieved the issues are behind us. (...) I want to give them a continued reason to justify that optimism. I firmly believe at the core of this company we are a software development company, and we need to develop great products and tell our customers ... what we're doing in developing great products. ... We'll say, "Here's something you can trust." Our customers right now are watching and waiting to see what we do next. We have to still prove to them we are a relevant vendor to them. It's not a slam-dunk.
? Have you met any CA customers yet, and do you plan to set up customer sounding groups to meet with like other CEOs do?
S: I'm trying to see all of them at a customer conference coming up in Washington, D.C. I plan to talk to or meet with one customer every day, something that I did at my old job. I don't feel good if I don't talk to a customer every day. I am a very customer-focused guy.
? Where do you rank customers compared to, say, investors or employees in your priorities?
S: Customers pay the bills, so at the end of the day, customers always come first; they even come ahead of investors. ... You can not build a durable business if you do not have satisfied customers.
? Speaking of satisfied customers, I've heard some of them are very concerned by a CA marketing letter that went to them saying CA World would be postponed from 2005 to 2006. What do you say to them?
S: We are going to have a CA World in 2005. The team was concerned that the way we were tracking, it would be very difficult to have me stand up at CA World in spring 2005 and articulate a strong strategy for the business. (...) I need to go out and say here's what we're doing and our strategy. We felt we couldn't do that without postponing.
? So you are holding CA World after all in 2005?
S: Yes, we are looking now for dates in the fall (of 2005). I am anxious to do it. I like these things.
? Even some CA officials disagree about how many products you have, but you talked the other day about examining the 500 CA products for priorities. What might stay or go?
S: No one quite knows how many we have, but when I say 500 products, it really refers to 500 product families. What might stay or go, I have no idea. That's the honest answer. But I'll tell you how I am approaching this problem philosophically. I'm not looking to dump products, and (I) have a commitment to support customers on going-forward basis. (...) Life-cycle and systems management and security are very highly valued under the banner of enterprise infrastructure management. We're looking for ways to integrate those (priorities) and augment them through acquisition or development and to really concentrate on the things we're particularly good at.
? Will you continue to place a reliance on mainframe products, even though some financial analysts see that market slipping?
S: Mainframe products account for 50 percent of CA revenue, I believe. What I described is a pretty reasonable strategic direction, and inside each of these priorities, there are a variety of products, and some are mainframe and some are distributed. ... Quite obviously, we'll continue to focus on (the) mainframe, and we believe it's a very durable long-term platform for a lot of things. Mainframes are not going away. (...) We'd be crazy not to focus on mainframe. But you die if you don't continue to innovate and go forward. ... We want to be the systems and security management leader around mainframe, and we'll continue to invest in it.
We also have to focus where growth is. Windows, Linux and distributed systems are where the growth is, and we have solutions for those. ... Our play is integrated solutions around the enterprise. It has to be a heterogeneous solution and include Windows and other things.
? You're including wireless, for example?
S: Wireless devices are increasingly a part of the enterprise infrastructure. You have to be able to manage them. In retail, they are becoming absolutely ubiquitous.
? Have you gotten your new ethics official or whatever the title is as required?
S: As part of the third prosecutorial agreement, we will add a chief compliance officer, and we are in the process of finding someone that has the right profile and gravitas to be able to do this job. We agreed to add new independent directors to our board of directors. We just ... added Laura Unger to the board.
Europe: Gates: Software tycoon to ambassador?
By Peter Sayer; IDG News Service (Paris Bureau)
Is Bill Gates preparing to switch careers, from software architect to ambassador?
It began to look that way during the Microsoft Corp. chairman and chief software architect's trip to Paris in mid-November, where his schedule bore more resemblance to that of a visiting diplomat than of a software tycoon.
Gates met the French head of state, President Jacques Chirac, with whom he discussed the digital divide, the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other development issues, according to presidential aides.
At a meeting with the director general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco), Koichiro Matsuura, at its Paris headquarters, Gates signed a deal committing Microsoft to work with Unesco on projects to improve IT education in the developing world.
Over lunch, he held a press conference with Bernard Charles, the president and chief executive officer of Dassault Systemes SA, to discuss how the two companies will work together to develop 3-D design tools. You may not have heard of Dassault Systemes, the Paris-based software development subsidiary of French military and civil aircraft manufacturer Groupe Dassault, but you probably know one of its biggest customers, The Boeing Co.
Gates also spoke to civil servants about public IT infrastructure, and addressed a society of student entrepreneurs at one of the country's top engineering schools, advising them to let their choice of project be guided by passion, not profit.
A trip to Paris city hall did not fit Gates' schedule. "There was no time," said an aide.
That's a shame, because the city of Paris, until now a faithful Microsoft customer, is wavering. It recently commissioned a study of how much it would cost to switch its 17,000 desktop computers to open-source software instead.
The company conducting the Paris study had previously carried out similar work for the city authority in Munich. Last year, when Munich was debating whether to switch, Gates' sidekick Steve Ballmer flew all the way to Germany to persuade the city to stick with Microsoft.
Reporters in Paris wanted to know whether Gates saw a role for Microsoft in U.S.-international relations? Gates quickly dismissed this notion, saying that diplomacy was not the role of a commercial organization.
Perhaps that's for the best, because Ballmer's "diplomatic" mission to Germany was ultimately unsuccessful: this September, Munich chose Linux. And in Paris, the debate is still going on.
Asia and Pacific: NEC develops multicore cell phone processor
By Martyn Williams; IDG News Service (Tokyo Bureau)
Engineers at NEC Corp. have developed a processor for cellular telephones that includes three ARM processor cores in a single chip, a moved aimed at improving the multimedia capabilities of cell phones.
The MP211 chip was designed to improve the ability of cell phones to handle multimedia functions simultaneously, said Masato Edahiro, a research fellow at NEC's silicon systems research laboratories. In a demonstration in Tokyo on Wednesday, he showed the chip running a Java applet, a browser and displaying some video at the same time.
Most cell phones today have a single processor for handling the jobs required to keep the handset running and connected to the network. Some newer models use two processors, one for the wireless and radio functions and the other for applications and multimedia functions.
The MP211 chip goes a step further by providing what is essentially three chips-in-one, so that, for example, future handsets that process and display television images don't suffer image breakup when the phone is also receiving an e-mail.
The chip includes three ARM926 cores from U.K. chip design company Arm Ltd., each operating at 200MHz. One of the cores makes up part of a dedicated media processing engine that can handle images and H.264 standard digital video. The other two cores are used for applications such as running Java applets, the phone's browser, telephone book and e-mail client.
The processor will be sold by NEC Electronics Corp., the company's semiconductor arm, and samples of the chip are due in January 2005. The company expects sales to begin sometime in the first half of next year. This means the first phones with the chip could be available as early as the end of 2005.
Asia and Pacific: Singulus to support Blu-ray Disc mass production
By Paul Kallender; IDG News Service (Tokyo Bureau)
Blu-ray Disc will take an important step forward next year when Singulus Technologies AG begins selling machines for mass producing read-only versions of the discs, the company said Tuesday.
Singulus, in Kahl, Germany, is planning to supply machines that make the discs, called BD-ROMs, by the end of 2005, according to a spokesman from Sony Corp., one of the disc format's backers.
Read-only discs are used for prerecorded content, such as movies, and the Singulus equipment will enable disc makers to produce 25G-byte and 50G-byte discs. That's enough space for a high- definition version of a movie.
The move is seen by Sony as a big step toward enabling mass production of BD-ROMs, said spokesman Taro Takamine. Mass production of BD-ROMs requires the use of a template-like master disc and equipment to mass produce the copies. Sony has its own BD-ROM mastering technology, and Singulus will make the copying equipment and sell it to optical disc makers, Takamine said.
Higher-capacity technology is needed to replace DVDs for the storage of high-definition video. The ability to mass produce the Blu-ray Discs is important to promote the format in this market, where the main competitor is likely to be the HD-DVD (High Definition/High Density-DVD) format.
The Blu-ray Disc format is backed by a group of companies that includes Dell Inc., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. (Panasonic), Philips Electronics NV, and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. The competing HD-DVD format is backed by NEC Corp., Toshiba Corp., Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd. and optical disc maker Memory-Tech Corp.
Costs of discs and players are cited by protagonists as one of two critical issues that will decide whether Blu-ray Disc or HD-DVD will win the unfolding standards battle.
The announcement by Singulus will help disc makers produce BD-ROMs at nearly the same cost as DVDs, said Takamine.
Memory-Tech makes similar claims for the cost of producing HD-DVDs.
The company is already capable of mass producing HD-DVDs and is completing its sixth HD-DVD production line, said Masato Otsuka, general manager of Memory-Tech's engineering department. Each of these lines will be able to produce about 700,000 HD-DVD discs per month. Mass production should start next year, he said.
The cost claims by either camp can't be verified until after actual mass production of both formats begins, said Yasusuke Suzuki, a research manager for storage at IDC Japan.
"Right now, it seems that Blu-ray is more difficult to produce. I think that HD-DVD has the lead (on cost)," he said.
Another important issue is the availability of content, particularly from major Hollywood studios.
On Monday, Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures, New Line Cinema and HBO said they will release titles on the HD-DVD format. So far, only Sony Pictures, which is owned by Sony, has backed the Blu-ray Disc Format.
SMS: Singulus will release prototype machines to enable mass production of read-only Blu-ray Discs next year.