Wang stamp highly visible on industry profile of CA

Close your eyes and listen to Charles Wang, chairman of Computer Associates International, the world's fourth-largest software company, talk and you might think the raspy Brooklyn accent belongs to someone with a name like Vinny or Gino. Maybe it is that tough-guy voice which has fuelled the 53-year-old New Yorker's industry reputation as an outspoken - and ruthless, some critics say - executive as driven to win as another software leader, Bill Gates. Starting out in 1976 as a mainframe software maker, Computer Associates (CA) has dealt with rivals in a simple way: if you can't beat them, buy them. Despite mostly avoiding investment banks and keeping company debt to a minimum, CA has done just that, purchasing more than 60 companies in the past 20 years, including two that set CA back US$1.7 billion and $1.2 billion apiece. Employees at his takeover targets shuddered: it was rare for CA not to summarily lay off all employees except for key technical staff. Even the companies which bought CA's software were not safe. Top-heavy in legal talent - Mr Wang's brother Tony, a Cornell-trained lawyer, was company president for nine years - CA enthusiastically sued customers and clients over unpaid or disputed bills. The paradox is that Mr Wang is reputed to take care of his own employees well. A profile in the United States technology magazine Upside last summer claimed that even when CA had more than 6,000 employees, Mr Wang entered the name of every employee in his personal files. Mr Wang is quick to dispel that nonsense. 'I used to do the organisational chart when we had 2,000-3,000 employees. Because it was on my PC, I'd read it many times. History has a way of being distorted.' Mr Wang also laughs at his reputation as a take-no-prisoners businessman. 'I don't think I'm a confrontational person,' he said. 'Being outspoken doesn't mean I'm confrontational. I'm very frank, but I don't have to be in somebody's face.' For a long time, Mr Wang was so high-profile that he overshadowed his own company. Computer Associates specialised in applications and tools for mainframe computers. It wasn't sexy, but it was profitable - CA had $4 billion in revenue last year. Only Oracle, Microsoft and IBM made more money in selling software. Starting off as a software distributor for a Swiss company that Mr Wang and partners eventually bought out along with its name, Computer Associates was once virtually invisible. Today, the company is asserting itself as possibly the most important company in the emerging frontier of client/server computing. CA's flagship product is UniCenter TNG, software which manages computer networks. Mr Wang promises UniCenter TNG lets anyone, from a network manager to a managing director, view and control the inner workings of a computer network. UniCenter can do more than 'bug testing and network maintenance'. Mr Wang says that UniCenter performs all sorts of everyday tasks, like alert the chief executive whenever a 'request for a US$1 million cheque arrives in accounts payable', or even 'turn the lights on and turn the coffee maker off'. Four years ago, CA made 97 per cent of its revenue through sales of mainframe software. The balance is shifting. In its past fiscal year, CA's client/server business, including UniCenter, grew 50 per cent and made up one-third of its total revenue. Meanwhile, mainframe sales growth was flat. By 2000, Computer Associates hopes that client/server networks, which are basically groups of PCs or terminals controlled by a more powerful computer, will account for 60 per cent of its sales. CA sells more than 500 products used by more than 95 per cent of the Fortune 1,000 companies, including almost all of the estimated 50,000 IBM mainframe data centres worldwide. The Long Island, New York-based firm hopes to hit a home run when it releases its Jasmine multimedia database. Mr Wang is excited about Jasmine. He describes it as a 'pure object database' which handles pictures, sound, and animation better than the Universal Servers touted by Oracle and Informix. According to Mr Wang, Universal Servers are hybrids of regular relational databases, which excel at handling text and numbers, and object databases, better suited for handling multimedia. But the way objects are mapped to a relational database is inefficient and flawed, Mr Wang contends. 'At the risk of insulting Oracle and Informix, their databases are neither fish nor fowl.' With UniCenter mostly developed in-house (Jasmine is created by Fujitsu), CA is trying to shed its reputation as the place 'where software goes to die', as Oracle chairman Larry Ellison quipped. Mr Wang, himself a former software programmer, calls writing code an 'artistic process'. Nevertheless, critics said that CA's long-time strategy after buying a company was to milk revenues through software licensing as long as it would last, while failing to develop any new products. Mr Wang's reply? 'What gets the ink are the acquisitions,' he said. '[But] we've developed more product than any other independent software company.' CA has slowed down the frenetic pace of its purchases. Its last major one was the $1.2 billion purchase of Cheyenne Software, a data recovery software maker, last November. Mr Wang asserts that CA is 'always in a spending mood'. However, he dismisses the possibility of buying an operating system maker such as Novell or a hardware maker such as Sequent to better control how its client/server software is implemented. 'No, we're not interested in buying a platform,' he said. 'And we know what our core competency is, so we wouldn't buy a hardware box maker.' Nevertheless, he is busy signing deals with them. At Computer Associates' CA World conference in New Orleans in July, 25,000 of the faithful - resellers and software developers - listened to Mr Wang announce that 14 server hardware makers, including Sun, Digital, and NCR, would bundle a less powerful version of UniCenter on to their machines. Both IBM and Hewlett-Packard (HP) make systems management software, Tivoli and OpenView, respectively, which compete directly with UniCenter. But Tivoli costs '$250,000 and takes three months to install', while HP, as Mr Wang almost gleefully points out, is one of the companies bundling UniCenter Framework. 'They're not shipping OpenView. I think that's a very strong message.' For CA, Asia is a small but fast-growing region, making up about 10 per cent of revenues in the financial year ending March 31. Appropriately, China, where revenues grew 1,000 per cent last year, is CA's largest Asian market, Mr Wang says. Two years ago, Chinese President Jiang Zemin personally asked Mr Wang, whose parents are Shanghai natives, to return to China for the first time and help advise the country on how to develop its technology infrastructure. 'I enjoy working with China. They do look upon me as a role model, for which I am flattered.' He is a budding capitalist's hero. His 1996 salary and bonus were worth $6 million, which ranked Mr Wang as the highest-paid computer executive in the US. 'I think I'm underpaid,' he said, adding that measured by CA's stock gains over the years, 'I've done my job fairly well.' Mr Wang ranked even ahead of Bill Gates, though his personal fortune is reportedly in the hundreds of millions, as opposed to Gates' tens of billions. The similarities don't end there. Like Mr Gates, Mr Wang has written a book, TechnoVisions , in which he dabbles at predicting the future of computing.