EXEC I/O

Every so often, a performing artist comes along and takes the world by storm after years of obscurity. We often joke about such a person that they "took decades to become an overnight success."

How does this happen? Personally, I think it's a combination of quality and maturity - kind of like a fine red wine that reaches its peak as it ages - or like the mainframe.

After all, the mainframe is also (once again) becoming a platform of choice for business computing. While it has been around for 43 years, it has continuously evolved, and the business world is now reawakening to mainframe qualities of service and reevaluating total costs such as support personnel and power. As a result, it's beginning to look like an overnight success.

Similarly, CA has also grown up. Over the past 31 years, we've made (and acquired) a wide variety of mainframe management products, development tools and databases which help run the world's largest businesses day in and day out. We've established a place in the history of mainframe computing as the #1 ISV, and we take this role and responsibility seriously. Today, we want to ensure that our customers are getting full value from their mainframe and our products by using all the features, functions and options for which they are licensed.

That's Valued Today - the first half of our mainframe strategy that we've just begun to tell the world about.

Now, we're building on that theme to enable our customers to move forward with enterprise-wide IT management, particularly including the mainframe, to meet the business requirements and opportunities of tomorrow. In fact, Chris O'Malley, general manager of our mainframe business unit, has announced a five year plan to prove that we're moving forward with our mainframe customers and solutions, and not looking back. That's Essential Tomorrow.

Of course, this blog isn't the right place to tell you everything we are committing to - if you want to see more about that, you should visit http://ca.com/mainframe and follow the links to our Mainframe Solution Strategy brief.

However, what I will tell you is that I'm as optimistic as I've ever been about the future of the mainframe and CA. It's true that we've been through some rough patches together. And, if you've been a CA customer for a while, maybe you haven't seen as much emphasis on the mainframe as you would have liked.

Well, the good news is: all this time, we've been quietly chugging along, aging like fine wine, prepared to be a part of this mainframe ecosystem becoming an overnight success. And the time has come for us, as mainframers, as organizations that use mainframes, and here at CA, to show our stuff.

So, welcome to a new day of value, with the bright future essential for business IT success!

I look forward to your comments!