Abdulazziz Al-Salloum

Q. With more than 1,200 business software products, how does Computer Associates Middle East position itself to its customers?

A. It is true that positioning Computer Associates Middle East was not easy with the depth and breadth of Computer Associates solutions it represents in the market, and until recently CA-ME represented different technologies to different people. To some CA-ME was a mainframe solutions company, to others it provided some of the industry's best security solutions, and to still others it was the best helpdesk vendor, leading storage solutions provider, or data warehousing company.

Now to help customers understand what CA does, the company has grouped its product offerings into six focus areas: Unicenter for infrastructure management, eTrust for security management, BrightStor for storage management, Advantage for data management and application development, AllFusion for application life cycle management, CleverPath for portal and business intelligence.

Q. What are CA-ME's major plans for the next few months?

A. We will continue to maintain our leadership in enterprise management area. We will be focusing on our security and storage solutions. There are a number of existing products from CA that are currently in the 'beta' stage of testing. We look forward to introducing these products to the market within this fiscal year.

We will also be focusing on our Information Management products and will host a number of customer education seminars and road shows. We also plan to introduce a number of services offerings to enhance the return on investment for the technology implemented at our customer places. At the same time, we will continue to support all the major market-education initiatives taken locally, through sponsoring worthwhile causes.

Q. Which are the fastest-growing segments of CA-ME's diversified software portfolio?

A. In the Middle East, we are experiencing good growth in all our solution sets. Last year, we had a 30% increase, and we expect this momentum to continue. The solutions growing most significantly are the BrightStor storage solutions and the Trust security solutions. We are the regional leader in enterprise management though Unicenter products and also we are the only big helpdesk vendor in the region after the recent development in the IT service desk market.

Q. What is the outlook for the Middle East market?

A. Many analysts predict that the regional IT market will experience double digit growth, while many developed markets will see only single digit growth. The Middle East market is still in the development phase as far as IT infrastructure is concerned.

There are many organisations that are still upgrading their basic infrastructure. Key considerations like security, disaster recovery etc. are still in a growth phase. At the same time, many customers are also showing great interest in latest technology concepts like CRM, business intelligence and wireless IT infrastructure.

Q. What will be the next trend after storage and security?

A. We think the next trend in the regional market will focus around business continuity as well as business intelligence solutions. Organisations will continue to implement solutions that monitor, manage, analyse and automate the IT infrastructure.

Organizations will be also looking at providing business value through the use of technology. To do this, organisations will be resorting to BI solutions including EIS, DSS and portal applications. Integration of the applications, systems and data will be big focus for the regional companies as they are moving to provide many e- services.