CA: Don’t call it a comeback

Historically seen as an enterprise software vendor, CA is shifting some of its focus to the SMB space with the latest release of its Recovery Management suite, ARCserve Backup 12.5. Recovery Management is a $200m business within CA, and SMBs make up 75 percent of sales.

“We’re going to continue to focus on enterprise management software … At the same time, SMB is at the core of the release of 12.5,” explains Bill Lipsin, corporate senior VP, worldwide channels at CA.

As well as recovery management, the firm is also selling its data modeling and internet security ranges completely through the channel.

“We are betting our SMB strategy on the channel. That’s a pretty gutsy move for a company that’s been successful in enterprise through a direct sales model,” says Lipsin. “But over the last year or so has seen the channel coming back to CA.”

Lipsin says two years ago, the firm was “a little bit more fragmented, our strategy was not quite as concise, our programmes were not as concise and our technology was not as competitive.”

However, he says the return of partners is down to better technology and a better partner programme: “We’re going after market share with better technology, better programmes and we believe in total a better value proposition for our partners and customers.”

Says Lipsin: “12.5 is a major change. Our announcement of ARCServe last year put us back in the market – we had lost market share and were behind the competition in terms of technology. 12.5 puts us ahead of the competition. It has depduplication abilities, it has a management console that allows our partners and customers to manage their whole environment better than they ever have before, it has Unix and Linux capabilities – it is a major step change.”

 “We took the traditional ARCServe backup product, we bundled in replication and SR reporting, which was a standalone product. We bundled it all together as one solution and offered it for the same price as a typical backup product,” explains Adam Famularo, SVP and general manager, recovery management and data modeling business unit, worldwide.

The vendor is rolling out a partner programme, ‘Backup Wakeup Call’, across Europe that includes a series of discounts and financial incentives for existing and potential CA partners.

“The Backup Wakeup call programme is about getting peoples’ attention back into backup,” says Famularo.

If a partner replaces a competitive product with CA, they will receive an additional 25 percent discount: on a new product sale CA is offering an additional 16 percent discount and whether they win or lose a deal, resellers will still get an additional 12 percent rebate as long as the deal closes.

“This is all tied to deal registration,” he explains. “The reseller that comes to us and registers the deal gets these discounts. We don’t just want to have the discount and ruin the street value of the software. It guarantees that the rep that’s working on it gets that discount, making sure the rep much more money than they’ve ever made before.

He continues: “Our competition’s minimum deal size is $10,000 – we said we don’t want to do that. We want to incentivise more people to sell our software. So on competitive replacements we lowered that down by a fourth, and on new product sales we cut that in half.”

In addition, if a reseller is a member of one of CA’s competitor’s partner programmes, the firm will automatically move them over to its own programme at the same tier.

 “This is one of the richest programmes we’ve ever rolled out. You will not find another programme like this in the industry,” he says. “We were looking to raise the bar in a tough economic climate help our resellers’ sales reps make a lot of money selling CA’s ArcServe software,” he says. “Backup Wakeup call is two or three times more profitable than our competitors’ programmes.”

“There are still areas that people are spending money on,” concludes Lipsin. “At CA we want to make sure we have the map covered – enterprise technology, SMB technology – we are making it as simple as possible for our partners to understand our products, to install and implement those products, to generate services revenue – because we are not a services company, we are a software company – we are heavily dependent on our partners.”