CA's CTO says focus on integration

13.02.2006
CA Inc. recently named Mark Barrenechea its chief technology officer, responsible for its technology vision and strategy. He came to CA in 2003 from Oracle Corp. and has been the company's chief technology architect for the past year. He replaces Yogesh Gupta, who had been CTO since 2000 and is now senior vice president for business development. Barrenechea recently discussed his plans with Computerworld.

How do you see your job as CTO? As we look at what we're trying to achieve here at CA, integration is becoming more and more important to our customers. To be able to deliver on the enterprise IT management vision and potential, we need to ensure that security, storage, [business service optimization] and [enterprise solutions management] are fundamentally integrated at the data level, business process level and user experience. As we bring in world-class companies [as partners and by acquisition], we need a comprehensive road map to integrate, integrate, integrate.

In general, how do you see the role of the modern CTO? A modern CTO is supposed to be a public spokesperson and doesn't have line or operational responsibility. They get the big picture and have their hand on the knobs and dials. At the other end of the spectrum are the internally focused applied technologists who are sort of heads-down in the rank and file with the delivery of bits and bytes to enable technologies. I'd describe myself as somewhere in the middle.

How do you interpret that middle ground for your new job? We will have responsibility to deliver common components [and to form] the Advanced Research Group to look beyond the two-to-three-year cycles that we're delivering products against.

How big is your organization? A few hundred folks.

What are your plans for advanced research? We have sufficient scale where we want to do advanced research, and just historically haven't done it. We want to be forward-looking in our advanced research lab. We want a practical view of having high probabilities that what we incubate in our labs will progress into product.