Hitching a ride with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani

By PETER GRIFFIN

He received a thunderous standing ovation as he paced on to a purple-tinged stage at CA World in Orlando last week to address a crowd several thousand strong.

Rudolph Giuliani - "America's mayor", "Winston Churchill in a Yankees cap" - a tall, thin, suited figure that millions of TV viewers watched fleeing ground zero last September, urging passers-by to follow as his beloved New York crashed to his knees behind him.

If you could get past the constant baseball references and stop thinking about how much Giuliani was getting paid for his well-practised 45-minute speech, you'd probably have got the message - this guy loves America and what it stands for - democracy and capitalism.

"There's no system that removes more people from poverty more effectively than capitalism," he proclaimed earnestly.

On his political aspirations: "Am I going to run for president? Of what - the Yankees? I was mayor for eight years, I need some time for reflection."

On education: "The public education system has become more of a job protection system. We need to flick that."

And on terrorists: "I'll say this in the most non-belligerent way possible. We're right and they're wrong." Cue thunderous applause part 2.

With the patriotism still sloshing around America, Giuliani was a timely pick for software giant Computer Associates, which has in past years rolled out ex-president Jimmy Carter and news anchorman Walter Cronkite to fill guest speaker roles.

Elsewhere at CA World, chief executive Sanjay Kumar and his team of executives were talking up the relatively sexy parts of their multibillion-dollar business - web services, fancy portal technology, wireless device management, e-security and storage. Well, storage could hardly be considered sexy, but it's a sector that the company is looking to squeeze for all the growth it can in the next period as the core business of enterprise and infrastructure management loses its fizz and growth potential.

If Kumar wanted journalists and analysts to take away one message from CA World it was that everything the company did from now on would be tied to the web in some form.

In building web-based management products CA would remain "Swiss" he said, catering for both Microsoft's .NET and Sun Microsystem's Java 2 Enterprise Edition environments.

"Seventy per cent of information is locked up in old databases. Web services are the key to unlocking that," he added.

I got to test drive CA's revamped CleverPath Portal 4.0, which links multiple platforms, databases and web standards - .NET, XML, SML and SOAP and interacts with mobile devices.

A news junkie, I filled my portal with feeds from the media giants. A BBC news ticker floated across the top of the screen, while stock quotes updated themselves in another box.

I had a live video feed from the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, in one corner, a Disney World video clip played in another.

But that's just touching the surface, an internet user selecting a range of feeds from around the web and assembling them all in one user-friendly interface.

As with Microsoft's "digital dashboard" concept, the portal's real genius comes by acting as an interface for a range of back-end databases, presenting information from differing sources through one outlet.

The portal concept has also been made central to CA's storage products. The BrightStor software detects new storage devices as they are plugged into the network and lets IT staff view capacity and settings graphically through the portal.

Security-wise, CA's developers have been busy. Kumar launched eTrust 20/20, a futuristic-looking software interface that monitors everything from swipe card access points around a building to employees' internet and computer usage.

Hundreds of real-time feeds are fed into the software, allowing security staff to watch the virtual and physical meanderings of workers around company property.

Built with the help of a CA subsidiary that designs, among other things, F-16 jet fighter simulator software, 20/20 should go down well when released this year, even if the price tag will range from tens of thousands to millions of dollars depending on licence numbers and access points monitored.

The graphical interfaces underpinning 20/20 and Cleverpath will become more pervasive among CA's product range, which numbered around 1200, Kumar said.

Of note also was a bunch of new wireless network tools, under the Unicentre brand, which keep an eye on handheld computers connecting to the wireless local area network.

Download software to several handhelds simultaneously, check their battery power remotely or deny access to them if an absent-minded employee leaves it lying in an airport lounge.

The Pocket PC, Blackberry and Palm OS mobile platforms are being supported.

Unveiling new products that look to the future helped, temporarily anyway, to steer attention away from some of the larger issues facing CA. It's been a tough period for CA and the man at the helm.

Kumar has had to fend off probing accounting inquiries by the Securities Exchange Commission and the US Attorney's Office and stinging press articles that have helped to shave several dollars from CA's share price.

There has been the battle with billionaire shareholder Sam Wyly, who, with a knack for coinciding his attacks on the company's management with CA World, continues to call for CA chairman Charles Wang's blood.

Kumar is leading the push into the storage and security markets, putting Wang's strategy of growth through acquisition to one side for the moment.

Diversifying is the name of the game now for CA.

The results of the next few financial quarters will be telling.

Email Peter Griffin

* Peter Griffin attended CA World as a guest of Computer Associates.

samwyly.net