I arrived in Las Vegas for my 15th CA World—15 CA World events and 35 years of transformation at CA Technologies. Everywhere you turned you saw the same sense of urgency for the need for speed and agility at this year’s conference.  With 100 partners and 5,000 attendees, CA World 2011’s first two day included breakout sessions, education classes, technology demonstrations and networking with attendees from 33 U.S. states and 59 countries.

Bill McCracken’s opening keynote with Vivek Kundra, former CIO for the US; Michael Capellas, Chairman of VCE;  and moderated by former Facebook executive and founder of R to Z Media, Randi Zuckerberg, did a great job of demonstrating exactly how social media has become a transformational part of today’s business and IT world.  Within minutes of inviting the keynote audience to send questions to the panelist via Twitter there was a veritable explosion of input and questions.   It underscored the point of how social media is disrupting communication, decision making and the ever lasting impact it will have on IT strategy moving forward. It also underscored the value we can provide by integrating social media capabilities directly into the customer experience with our products.

The excitement and activity on the exhibition floor with customers and partners has been palpable. Everywhere you turned there were conversations under way about finding ways to solve today’s complex IT and business problems.
The overall message on business service based outcomes and delivering integrated solutions is clearly resonating with our customers.  

 All of the people I talked to are focused on delivering value through use of a combination of CA products.  They welcome the focus and resolve CA Technologies has at dramatically improving the ability to enable these activities.
In a technical discussion with one of our customers in the healthcare industry, they wanted to be sure that we at were fully aware of the value of integrated solutions across the portfolio.  Delivering flexible proven solutions that span the domains of Modeling, Assembly, Assurance, Automation, and Security provide a tremendous opportunity for our customers and CA Technologies, to enable transformational change.  During David Dobson’s session he gave examples of the work we’ve done with Best Buy and how “saving Christmas” for them was an excellent example of the strength of impact our technologies can have for our customers and end users.

CA World was a great event.  I am looking forward to helping more of our customers change IT at the speed of business.
If you weren’t able to attend CA World 2011, but want to watch the keynotes, you can register to access the virtual event here.