CA's new CTO discusses development, recruiting

27.01.2006
Computer Associates International Inc. recently named Mark Barrenechea as its chief technology officer. According to a statement, he will be in charge of the company's technology vision and strategy and will work closely with CA's business units to ensure common technology architecture and services across its product line. He will oversee a research group on products for emerging technologies, such as radio frequency identification, and will be a liaison with universities on research. He joined CA in 2003 after holding various positions at Oracle Corp., and has been CA's chief technology architect for the past year. He replaces Yogesh Gupta, who had been CTO since 2000 and will become senior vice president for business development. Barrenechea discussed his new position with Computerworld.

Why were you named 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 security, storage BSO [business service optimization] and ESM [enterprise solutions management] are fundamentally integrated at the data level, business process level and user experience. As we bring in world-class companies such as Niku, Illumine, Concord and our proposed acquisition of Wiley, we need a comprehensive road map to integrate, integrate, integrate. CEO John Swainson has determined that I'm kind of a fit to deliver not just a vision but also the deliverables about that common architecture and integration platform.

What do envision the modern CTO's role to be, not just at CA but at similar companies? A modern CTO is supposed to be a public spokesperson and doesn't have line or operational responsibility. Yet they are public spokespeople and very good at it. They get the big picture and have their hand on the knobs and dials. One type is the public spokespeople type. They are the sage from the stage vs. the guy from the side. 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.

So, how do you interpret that middle ground for your CA role? We will have responsibility to deliver common components, forming the Advanced Research Group, to look beyond the two-to-three-year cycles that we're delivering products against. We'll be enhancing customer experience around usability and so forth. We also will be high on developer productivity and how to make the modern programmer more productive. You have to be constantly concerned about internal process. There's the element of continuing to define tech strategy and communicating it publicly. There will be public evangelism around that vision and strategy.

How big is your organization going to be? A few hundred folks.

OK, so beyond this two-to-three-year cycle for delivering identified products, what are some of the cool coming technologies? Everybody talks about the next big thing, which is one of those terms like Google, which has become a verb. Nowadays, technology companies in software are looking for their iPod, and by that I mean, IP OverDose. So, what's our iPod? There are a couple of technologies that could really change IT. Everything will be IP-based, and we're about halfway there. With everything IP-based, it's a very different IT organization. Storage becomes IP addressable. Today, we're 20% penetrated on VoIP, but there will be IP devices, from big phone switches to other things. Guiding our own advanced research, we're starting with IPv6, RFID and making the enterprise IP addressable. Because once you identify everything as IP addressable, you can discover it, track it, and management becomes, almost, based on a query.