CA Gets Up Front About E-Commerce With Platinum Apps.

By William Fellows

Computer Associates International Inc will use front-end 3D and visualization technologies that it acquired with its Platinum Technology Inc buy to try and extend the dominance of its back- end database and management products to the front-end of e- commerce networks. Deployed mostly to manage back-end transaction applications and servers, CA is largely unseen at the front-end of e-commerce systems.

Although it claims three of the five largest web transaction fulfillment sites among its users, CA president and COO Sanjay Kumar admits that the company has "not done a good job of communicating the front-end message." As part of a new focus on end-to-end information management following the acquisition of Platinum, CA says it also plans to leverage its recently- announced Neugents neural network technology on top of Platinum's data warehousing, data and knowledge management products to provide new ways of representing and analyzing data.

Yesterday in New York CA claimed the addition of Platinum's products would enable it to build a new generation e-commerce platform but was rather vague about what that platform would be. However it clearly hopes that by increasing its exposure at the front end of e-commerce networks it will gain better marketing traction for the highly profitable back end management software and services which account for the majority of its revenue. "We are not the c in dot.com," Kumar admitted, "but maybe we should think about that."

Some of the newly integrated CA/Platinum product lines will be shown at CA-World in New Orleans next month, including a risk analysis, assessment and management suite which has been crafted from CA and Platinum products, including pieces of the latter's Memco security software. CA says it has around a dozen customers using the software which it expects to make generally available by year-end.

Also on show will be Jasmine TND, a version of CA's object database fitted with the Neugents neural network agent 'intelligent analysis' technology acquired from AIWare in 1997, a modeling tool claimed to enable users to make predictions about future behavior based on past activity. CA says that by year-end it will also make the management tools it currently offers for predicting when Windows NT servers are likely to go down available for OS/390 and Unix operating systems.

In mind of the growing competition posed to Platinum's traditional business by BMC Software Corp following its acquisition of Boole & Babbage and New Dimension Software, CA says it will shortly begin a campaign aimed at converting users of BMC's DB2 management and New Dimension scheduling tools to its software. While CA identifies BMC and IBM Corp as its chief competition it says it will continue to support the relationship with IBM under which Big Blue uses the Memco security software for use with its Unix products.

CA says 90% of the restructuring for integrating Platinum has now been completed. CA says all 6,000 Platinum employees have been offered jobs and that it expects to be up to 21,000 employees in total by the end of this calendar year. Platinum CEO Andrew Filipowski leaves the company today having, he says "handed over my baby to the right company," but will continue to consult with CA. CA says it expects the efficiencies it has been able to make following the acquisition amount to 10% in research and development; 20% in the field; and 90% in administration. Even with the reduction in overheads, CA expects it will take a couple of years to get Platinum anywhere near its own profit profile. CA says it will maintain standalone Platinum products for at least two years even where it is going to combine them with its own products.

Meanwhile in product news, CA says it will integrate its data transport and TNG front-end technologies with Platinum's DecisionBase, InfoPump, InfoRefiner and InfoTransport products. It will combine its PR/MVS and PR/OEE repositories with Platinum's metadata and repository. It expects to create a single suite of business intelligence tools. The Platinum ADvantage development tools will be integrated into Jasmine TND. Advantage and Platinum's rules-based Aion development environment will be extended to include component development. CA says it will integrate Platinum's AutoSys scheduling products into a single job management console. It says it will market standalone performance products as well as applications integrated within its Unicenter TNG framework and will add Platinum's consulting services into its own professional services. It promises more detailed product roadmaps at CA-World.