Wang wowed 'em in the Big Easy - Computer Associates chmn Charles Wang releases Unicenter TNG Framework during CA World show in New Orleans - Company Operations - Brief Article

Software Magazine, Oct, 1997 by Patrick Porter

Charles Wang, chairman of Computer Associates, has got to be a marketing genius. Every July or August he holds CAWorld in the hottest place on earth, New Orleans, and then rents all the cold rooms to hold seminars. This year some 25,000 CA customers--along with 500 analysts and reporters--trooped down to the Big Easy. And once again, Wang had a captive audience. With afternoon temperatures soaring above 100 degrees there was no incentive to roam the French quarter before dark. But this year, Wang had something more than the torrid heaton hisside. He had a compelling story to tell that even now still resonates in the marketplace. That story, of course, was the unveiling of the Unicenter TNG Framework, which CA is giving away for free and which some 14 leading hardware and software vendors have agreed to bundle with their systems.

"CA has absolutely trumped Tivoli by giving away the framework, by opening up all the APIs and by making the product self-installing," says Peter Kastner, vice president of the Aberdeen Group. "In one move they have eliminated all the anti-Unicenter messages that had built up over the last couple of years." Kastner, of course, is Referring to critics Who claimed--albeit unfairly--that Unicenter was a closed, monolithic systems management product that did not allow customers to plug-in best-of-breed applications a la Tivoli's TME 10 offering. Now of course, there can be no doubt. As more and more companies switch on the Unicenter Framework, they will discover what a roomful of analysts and reporters at CAWorld learned for themselves during a hands-on test drive: The framework is easier to load than a word processor and it comes equipped with surprisingly powerful systems management capabilities.

Last year, the IT industry raved about Larry Ellison's vision of network computers and how they would cut the total cost of ownership (TCO) of desktops to acceptable levels. NCs will certainly play an important role in cost-cutting on some desktops. But this summer in New Orleans, Charles Wang pointed the way to real TCO control: end-to-end systems management based on a market-leading framework that's free and easy to use.