CA looks to cloud, tighter APAC partner network

Fresh from a six-month break following his departure from Sun Microsystems, Lionel Lim is ready to start a new stint as Asia-Pacific president of CA Technologies (CA), where he hopes to push the IT management software company as a thought leader in the cloud arena as well as improve its channel partner ecosystem in the region.

Prior to his appointment, Lim had spent 20 years at Sun in various capacities, most notably, as president and COO of Sun Microsystems Asia-Pacific. Before Sun, he spent a decade at Hewlett-Packard.

With this track record for strong commitment to the companies he joins, now at CA, he says he is in it for the long-haul, too.

In an interview with ZDNet Asia, Lim admitted that CA had been on a decline over the past few years but expressed confidence that the company is now on its way up. He added that he is now looking to build on its strong drive into cloud computing and attract more regional customers into its fold.

He also outlined his strategy for CA, touching on cloud computing, and revealed the lessons he learnt over the years he has been in the IT industry.

Q: What did you do after leaving Sun Microsystems and why did you choose to now join CA?
Lim: I took a six-month break after Sun was acquired by Oracle when the merger was finalized at the start of the year. During this period, I had several job offers but decided to take up CA’s offer and joined them at the end of August this year.

Why CA? I think it is a financially sound company with clarity of vision and a comprehensive, high-quality portfolio of products that are relevant to the market. Additionally, it’s a company in transformation, ideally positioned and moving aggressively into what I believe would be the technology of a new era–cloud computing.

CA’s deep management expertise, the breadth of its cloud computing offerings and its vendor-agnostic, heterogeneous platform approach will make the company a leader in the cloud space and I want to be the one leading the company’s charge in Asia-Pacific.

Did you have to go through a steep learning curve since you moved from a predominantly hardware-based company at Sun to now a software company?
No, I did not. Most of Sun’s customers were after its Solaris server operating system (OS) which is a software, so in that, there’s no real business change for me.

Then, as it is now, customers continue to be my topmost concern. Nothing is more important than them.

Any thoughts about how Oracle is managing former Sun projects such as the Solaris server OS and Java?
It’s inappropriate for me to comment on these matters.

What lessons and attributes have you learnt and picked up during your 30 years in the IT industry that you hope to foster in your new environment?
First, we will need to be absolutely customer-focused. If we concentrate on delivering services that will help our customers’ businesses, they will keep coming back to us. We will have established ourselves as their trusted partner.

Second, I’ll be looking to hire talented people of high integrity in order to train them and, subsequently, trust them to do their jobs well. Attracting, developing and retaining the best talents are crucial to making CA and its customers successful. I hope to build CA into a very squeaky clean company that’s compliant to all regulations.

Third, our company cannot thrive alone. We will need the help of our partners that align to our vision and are able to effectively support our initiatives and products. To address this, we will be broadening our market coverage in the region by roping in more channel partners that will stay with us for the long-term and invest in their capabilities so that we have a stronger overall ecosystem.

Why focus on your channel ecosystem? Was it not performing as it should before you came onboard?
In the United States and Europe, direct selling is very much entrenched in the business culture of these markets. The same cannot be said for Asia-Pacific, in which channel partners are very important to get products into the market.

As such, I’m hoping to establish a stronger ecosystem in order to provide more service support for our larger Asian enterprises, as well as reach out to new businesses. Previously, our Asia-Pacific partners have had business dealings with CA opportunistically, but from now onward, our partner engagement will be more purposeful.

I’m also hoping to give our partners more insight into our cloud management products as this is an area that our company has been strengthening through acquisitions of Nimsoft, 3Tera and Oblicore, all of which were bought in 2010.

Where do you see cloud computing evolving into and where does CA fit into the overall picture?
Having been in the center of innovation during my time at Sun in the 1990s, I can safely say that there has been not much change in the data center space 15 to 20 years on, except that it is becoming more complex to manage.

With cloud computing, the heterogeneous datacenter environment will lead to faster deployment of IT resources and applications. Beyond the hardware and software issues, it will boil down to having the tools to manage the disparate virtual machines and programs running on top of these.

For me, and for CA, cloud computing is all about managing IT systems and making sure these are always available and secure for our enterprise customers. This is the thought leadership that I hope will propel CA back to the top from its down period following the dot-com bust years.