CA Unit Adds Channel Chief

What do data backup and modeling have in common? If you're CA Technologies it means they have the same umbrella channel program, even if there is little overlap between the customers and partners.

The company's Recovery Management and Data Modeling (RMDM) organization now has a new general manager: Mike Crest, a 12-year veteran of the company, who was previously GM of CA's Northern U.S. territory. Crest's predecessor, Adam Famularo, was promoted to the position of GM for CA's cloud business several months ago. Famularo is driving CA's entire cloud strategy.

CA's data modeling product ERwin, is a popular tool among developers. CA has 50 partners. ARCserve is CA's line of backup and recovery software. CA says it has 10,000 ARCserve partners.

For RMDM, Crest's first move was to appoint a channel chief, David Roberts, in a newly created position. Roberts comes to CA from Websense, where he was SVP Americas channel sales. Prior to that he was a channel manager at McAfee.

"CA Technologies understands that you are adopting new models and new technologies to grow your revenue and win the business of end customers who are themselves facing evolving business challenges," Crest said in a letter to partners Tuesday.  "Our team is 100 percent committed to helping you do that."

In an interview, Crest explained why two unrelated products fall under one go-to-market strategy. "The commonality is really the delivery model in that both solution areas are very dependent on a partner ecosystem," he said. "The future will be the same in that our design for this particular business unit is to have a channel centric model and that's where a great deal of commonality comes into play. While those partners may not be the same, they are both very partner dependent."

Also, he said both have business models that are very much shifting from a traditional software sell to a managed services and potentially cloud delivery model. "The cloud is forcing a lot of convergence into areas in which partners traditionally haven't participated, many have been traditional sell-through value added resellers that add value or services to a given transaction," he said.

Crest said he envisions using cloud services from partners Amazon Web Services and Microsoft to deliver both software offerings in the future.

No major changes to existing partner programs are planned but Roberts said he hopes to flesh them out with new options within 30 days, particularly as it relates to those looking to evolve to managed services.

"We will look at margin enhancement programs and other things that help their businesses and then as we expand our channel reach we will look into geographic areas where we need help," Roberts said. "We will look at vertical markets where we need help, we will look at delivery options with MSPs. Those are the kinds of things that we're looking at."

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on September 23, 2010