Anyone Else Work with CA?

[legion]

As I've said before, I program in the Aion language for which CA is the vendor. I've always considered myself lucky to be under the radar of the sales staff.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/11/27/8394334/

[einreb]

Ah, the power of MS Excel...

A lot of things have gone wrong for CA in 2006, but if there is one example that embodies the company's travails, it is the debacle over sales commissions. Because Swainson had reorganized the sales staff to improve customer relations, it was necessary to adjust the commissions. So the CEO assigned his top sales executive to redesign the plan.

Two problems quickly emerged, says former CA executive Williams, who was brought in to try to keep the plan from spinning out of control. First, he says, "the actual commissions plan - the documen - was very, very confusing, almost impossible to interpret." Worse, perhaps, was the second impediment: implementing it on CA's sclerotic internal computer systems.

CA, Williams says, had a brigade of 15 spreadsheet jockeys in the finance department who were assigned the unenviable task of individually calculating each commission for the company's 4,000 salespeople.

As Williams puts it, "A lot of the internal systems were internally developed and had not been updated, had not been integrated together. So it was a very much a spaghetti code of an application. And no one could believe any of the data." The 15 finance staffers had to "verify the data that no one believed and then ultimately to certify it and put it back into the system."

[legion]

There are some real gems in this article:

"But for CA, shoddy ethics have been replaced by bumbling execution."

"One reason it's been so hard to fix CA's internal systems is that the company barely had any. In fact, it turns out that the business-software powerhouse - which has products ranging from database management to storage and security running inside more than 95 percent of the companies in the Fortune 500 - had never really bothered to use business software. We're not kidding."

"Where Microsoft has long been the most feared software company, the old CA claimed the title of most despised - not by competitors but by its own customers."

"But Kumar was a liar, of course, and an astonishingly convincing one at that. And for a long time even an astute accountant like Schuetze was hornswoggled. As the director puts it, "Kumar could sell sand to Saddam Hussein."

[stomachmonkey]

I just quit in Sept. w/out another job lined up. Made it exactly a year to the day. A month into the gig I knew that I'd made a horrible mistake.

What a f'd up place.

The people were nice enough but the lack of structure and accountability was the worst I've seen in 25 yrs of being in the workforce.

Scott

[Aerkuld]

I thought this was going to be about superglue.

[dhoward]

Met "Chuck" (Charles Wang) one time at a CIO conference I was speaking at. He doen't like to be called "Chuck". He also kept asking when I was going to spend more money with him. Sanjay Kumar was a slimey dude who gets whatever he deserves.
CA is a cult. Like Amway....

I spent several million dollars with them one year.

Actually some pretty good products if you had any real systems knowlege...

[stomachmonkey]

Originally posted by dhoward

Actually some pretty good products if you had any real systems knowlege...

That's the problem. They are a company built on acquisition. There's only one product that they can claim to have developed themselves.

They go out and buy good product built by good companies and then try to assimilate them resulting in multiple people responsible for the same function. Making it worse is they never had a solid culture or foundation to build on so the whole thing is shakey.

Any time you try to do something there you can't find any one person or group that is actually empowered to make a decision that can affect anything.

Bizzare place.

[stomachmonkey]

Here's a good one, so they sell their consumer product online for $xx.95.

Someone says, hey, "why not $xx.99? The customer won't care so why are we giving up .04 cents on each sale."

Pretty good idea considering the volume of business they do online it was a big chunk of cash so they change the official price book and update the price in the accounting system.

Problem is no one actually changes the price with Digital River, an outside company that handles the ecomm transaction/shipping who continue to charge $xx.94.

Some time goes by and they can't figure out why the books don't balance. Someone also realizes that they are losing cash on returns and then finally figures out that they are selliing stuff for .04 cents less than they are booking it for AND on every return they are giving the customer back .04 cents more than the customer paid for it.

This went on for nearly a year before they figured it out.

Scott

[dhoward]

LOL!
I have no doubt!!

[legion]

Doesn't surprise me either. The way they redid their licensing a few years ago really pissed off some customers...

[dhoward]

Seems like you had to buy "power units".
We kept calling them powerballs. Pissed them off until they really thought about it...

[cstreit]

I've worked for a series of small software firms for the last 10 years. Every one lived in terror of a CA buyout, especially the customers.

CA buys you, raise prices, provide zero support, and milk it into the ground...