CA技术CEO Michael Gregoire Is Betting on Innovation

MichaelGregoire将技术上的巨大变化视为重新思考自己所做工作的机会。这位加拿大土著高中时在苹果电脑上学习编程，职业生涯的头12年是在德克萨斯州普莱诺市的电子数据系统公司度过的，这家公司由罗斯·佩罗创立，负责管理大型企业的信息技术corporations. By 2000, Gregoire was running EDS’s financial services information solutions group, and he saw that its core custom-built-applications business was being threatened by off-the-shelf software packages created by enterprise-resource-planning companies like SAP and PeopleSoft.

“所有这些公司都在爆炸，”48岁的格雷戈尔说，他拥有安大略省滑铁卢威尔弗里德劳里尔大学物理学学士学位和圣安娜加州海岸大学工商管理硕士学位。“价值主张是你不必从头开始写东西。我觉得世界正在远离定制应用程序。”

Gregoire于2000年5月加入PeopleSoft，担任咨询部门的高级副总裁。2004年12月，软件巨头甲骨文公司（Oracle Corp.）以103亿美元恶意收购PeopleSoft，当时Gregoire管理着一支由全球4000多名专业人员组成的军队，帮助公司实现了收入翻番。他决定不和甲骨文一起去。三个月后，他成为Taleo公司的首席执行官，Taleo公司是一家专门从事劳动力招聘的私营软件制造商。2005年10月，他将总部位于加州都柏林的Taleo上市，并扩展了其人才管理产品套件，在托管平台上向客户提供软件即服务（SaaS）。“SaaS的整个概念是非常非常新的，”Gregoire说。

In February 2012, Oracle agreed to buy Taleo for $1.9 billion — “through a very friendly sale,” Gregoire notes — and Gregoire was once again out of a job. That summer he started talking to the board ofCA技术1976年，由查尔斯·王和罗素·阿尔茨特（Russell Artzt）以计算机协会的身份成立，为IBM大型机提供软件。CA Technologies于2010年更名，以反映其业务的“全面广度和深度”，涵盖大型机、分布式计算平台和云计算。这家总部位于纽约州伊斯兰迪亚的公司的软件和服务帮助客户管理和保护其IT应用程序和基础设施。

Since Gregoire became CEO in January 2013, CA Technologies has generated an average of $1.15 billion in revenue each quarter, with about half of that coming from its mainframe business. He plans to increase revenue by focusing on innovative new products, especially software that can be delivered on demand as a service. An avid cyclist who is signed up to compete in California’s 129-mile Death Ride in July, Gregoire recently met with亚博赞助欧冠Editor Michael Peltz at CA Technologies’ New York City offices to discuss his first year as CEO and his plans for growing his company.

Institutional Investor: Could you have gone to work for Oracle after it acquired Taleo?

格雷戈尔：Yeah, I think so. [But] once you’ve been a public company CEO — if I wanted to work again, I’d want to work in that kind of context, in that environment, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back and have a big operational role. I thought I’d do some board work, do some angel investing and kind of just be in and around the intelligentsia of [Silicon] Valley — help young, first-time CEOs on how to scale a company, how to work with a board, how to make the right decisions between go-to-market and R&D and innovation. And I thought that would be rewarding and enlightening to me. And what I found was, I just had this yearning to lead and to run a business and to be in the game.

Why CA Technologies?

It’s a company that shouldn’t settle for second-best. They should be able to get whatever they want. And the strategy that they had was to try to get this company that’s got a great franchise, spends $660 million on R&D, has global distribution, mission-critical application capabilities, a customer list that’s to die for, superstrong relationships in the Fortune 500 — how do you take all of these assets and turn it into a modern software company that’s kicking out new innovation on a regular basis?

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You didn’t mind moving from California to New York?

Oh, I minded very much. But at the end of the day, it was absolutely the right thing to do. To go do this job, you have to be 100 percent committed. And if I was living in California, I’m not sure the employee base would believe that I was here for the long haul, and I was here and committed to going and making this happen. When you [move with] two 14-year-old children that have a great life and 290 days of sunshine, that’s a big commitment.

How do you attract top engineers and software programmers to CA’s headquarters on Long Island? It’s not exactly Silicon Valley.

我们有六个主要的集线器，做纯粹的研发和创新，[长岛]是其中之一。但如果你想到我们所在的地方，他们就是你想要的地方。我所做的第一件事之一是，我打开了硅谷研究中心，坐落在山谷的心脏。我们那里有大约500人;它在[高速公路] 101，大标牌上。这是我们正在做很多创新的地方。许多移动技术正在那里建造。德克萨斯州奥斯汀，是另一个刚刚成为伟大工程人才的温床的地方。我们在波士顿以外的弗拉明翰。那里没有伟大的人才不足。 We do a lot of our mainframe development in Prague, and I think the average age of an engineer there working on the mainframe is under 30. We also have our own center in India: We have about 2,800 people in Hyderabad and Bangalore. So we are able to attract talent because we’re in the right places. And the best engineers, they want to work with and for great leaders, they want to work on the most interesting things, and they want to win. And if you can provide an environment like that, I think you have an opportunity to attract the best resources.

大型机如何适应您的业务？

The mainframe is still an important part of our story, and we’re one of the only companies, next to IBM, that’s still investing in the mainframe. But we’re trying to modernize the platform. For example, we have a product called Chorus that allows you to manage mainframes using a graphical user interface. Nobody has anything that sophisticated to manage a mainframe on the market.

第二,我们试图把现代infrastructure awareness to the mainframe. There’s a product we have called Vtape. Instead of putting a backup onto a tape — you know, a magnetic tape — and having to cart it off-site, you hit another button and we automatically stream that to AWS [Amazon Web Services]. For a penny a terabyte, you could have your data highly secured, coming off your mainframe, streaming to a hard disc up in a public cloud. You know, these are the kind of concepts from an innovation point of view that we’re bringing to bear.

你来后收入基本持平。你将如何种植它？

Well, this is the whole innovation message. We have a couple things that are unique to the CA story. One, we have this franchise in the mainframe that’s about half of our revenue, and it’s mission-critical work, but that’s a platform that’s just not growing. So the whole idea there is to add enough value and add enough innovation that the current customers you have take advantage of it and feel that they’re getting value, and they’re willing to pay for that.

现在，当你有这么大的东西，减少了一点，这给另一半的业务带来了很大的压力，这是你想要发展的领域。因此，当你开始新的一年时，你必须弥补遗留平台的不足，这只是技术的自然进化。所以你的新点子一定很精彩。我想说的是，我们在大型机上获得大创意的增长速度与收入下降速度一样快的记录，这是我们必须解决的问题，而真正做到这一点的方法只有两种。第一，我们拥有市场所需的高度创新的产品，这些产品将易于使用、易于安装、易于维护和销售。当你看看我们是如何花费我们的研发资金时，都是围绕着这些主题。我们有很多面向SaaS的产品，目前市场上有7种，而且都在以非常高的两位数增长。

Second, we have to be very smart about the acquisitions we bring in. Acquisitions are a tool, but I think the company spent a little bit too much time on them and kind of got away from the first thing of being a great software company, being able to build software from scratch and build out our own net new ideas with input from customers. So we’re trying to balance the two: Use acquisitions when they’re appropriate, but clearly have a focus on organic engineering.

你有最近推出的创新产品的好例子吗？

We just launched a product called Nimsoft Monitor Snap. I think it startled a number of people. In the same way that you could go download an application from the iTunes store or the Google Android store, you can go to our website and download a very sophisticated monitoring tool that’ll allow you to monitor up to 30 devices for free. Primarily, you’d be monitoring servers, network storage equipment, disc drives. Now, this is software that eight to ten years ago would have cost a million dollars and taken six months to implement; it takes 45 minutes to implement. And the whole idea here is easy to use, easy to sell, easy to understand, and our view is, if companies see what we really can do, they’ll be willing to engage with us on a subscription or a license to do more.

Are you looking to expand your client base?

Absolutely. As I said before, we have done a fabulous job for the Fortune 500, or even the Global 500. There’s not one of those companies that’s not running CA software, and it’s running mission-critical software, whether it’s on the mainframe, distributed or in the cloud. But one of the beauties of the cloud is, it democratizes technology — in the same way that Nimsoft Monitor Snap ten years ago would have cost a million dollars and taken six months to implement. If you’re a smaller company — $300 million to $2 billion in revenue — there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have great technology. And we have this great technology that’s been running the biggest corporations in the world for years, making it easier to use, easier to install, less expensive to run ... driving into that space. That’s net new growth for us. And that’s a very important market, and I think that we have to do more to make sure that we get into that market.

What does cloud computing mean for the future of the mainframe?

嗯，我想这只是另一个工具。如果你看看IBM是如何定位大型机的，首先，他们不再使用“大型机”这个词了。他们只是把它看作云中的另一个服务器。这对我们来说是好事，因为这个平台，如果它是现代化的，并以适当的价格使用，我认为它只是成为另一个工具，在阿森纳的商业专业人士。CA已经有了37年的丰富历史，它是一个异构提供商，提供了三个方面的服务：安全性、基础设施管理和应用程序管理。因此，对我们来说，在大型机上、分布式和云中拥有最好的产品更为重要，因为工作负载将在这三种环境中的一种环境中进行，而且无论客户希望在哪个特定平台上运行其工作负载，我们都希望成为其中的一部分。

What does “big data” mean for CA?

It means two things. First of all, there’s security, application management and infrastructure management of the environment and platforms that run big data. All of them have to be secure; there’s going to be applications that run on them; and the actual hardware that is used — the infrastructure — and how it participates in the overall enterprise need to be monitored. So there’s a whole side of our business that takes care of that for big data.

And then the really interesting story, I think, is: What do we do with all of the data that we have? I think we’re early, early days on that, but there’s a lot of information that we’re collecting, both on the infrastructure management side as well as on the development side. We have a number of data scientists that work out of our San Diego office, and their job is to take a look at this data and try to understand how we can take this data and turn it into a product or provide some level of value back to our customers. And I think the story’s still untold on that for CA, but this is definitely something that we’re working on in the labs.

What would you do with the data?

Primarily,predictive analytics. You know, one of the things you always want to do is, you want to intercept something before it fails. Any time you can get somebody a little bit of predictive intelligence about how their applications are running or how their infrastructure’s running, so that you don’t experience downtime, that’s incredibly valuable. • •

Get more from Gregoire in his video interview, “在增长和创新之间取得平衡.”