CA Meets IT, Integration Challenges
Computer Associates' Don LeClair shares his thoughts on integration, IT-development barriers, and more.
by Matt Carter

Posted April 30, 2003

Don LeClair Vice President, Office of the CTO Computer Associates

Don LeClair is Vice President in the Office of the CTO at Computer Associates, the $3 billion software and services company based in Islandia, New York. Don spoke with FTPOnline's Matt Carter about the challenges facing his group, how they are using CA's portal technology to safely deliver Web Services data to partners, as well as how they are using beta releases to break down divisions between their development and IT departments.

Web Services Behind Portlets
Matt Carter: First of all, can you give me an overview of Computer Associates' infrastructure?

Don LeClair: From an IT perspective, we have a single, worldwide, connected network to tie all of the offices together. CA is 15,000 people in 50 countries. This includes software development not just in North America, but also in Europe, Australia, and the Far East. We have a distributed organization, both from the sales force and where we do business as well as how we build and deliver our products. We also have a lot of applications that run on Windows servers, on Solaris, on Java—so like any large company with a long history, we have a remarkable mix of hardware and software that we build and deploy our applications from.

Carter: How does CA use its own software products in your IT environment?

LeClair: Given the heterogeneous environment of our back end, we have a strong incentive to Web-enable and provide a consistent interface across all of these systems for our employees and customers. This would help our employees do their jobs more effectively, as well as give our customers a single view to CA. If you are a CA customer, you want to be able to get information about your outstanding contracts, your build, your support issues, and get that kind of information online. And if you're an employee, certainly in a customer-facing position, you want to be able to get the same kind of information that we're giving to our clients.

Doing that requires a lot of integration across platforms. So, we use a combination of a Microsoft platform as well as Java. Given our operating environments today—Windows, Solaris, and mainframe—we tend to use Java in a lot of our multiplatform applications. Plus, we have significant initiatives to deliver useful pieces of functionality as portlets in the context of those portals, so you can get information from multiple environments and integrate that onto a single person or customer's desktop.

Carter: Do portlets use Web services, or are they separate from Web services?

LeClair: That's a good question. We would describe a portlet as a piece of information that you can get at, or a presentation or a window within a portal. As a matter of fact, the standard in our IT-development practice is to provide the business-level processing behind those portlets as Web services.

So, here's our typical portlet implementation: We'll have a Web service, for example, to get customer information such as name and address and display it. In that case, it probably is talking to our contract-tracking system on a mainframe. We then deliver a Web service, and then we can deploy that through a portal and present that to a UI, to either an employee or a customer. We're building a growing library of Web service implementations to integrate our back-end systems, and we are seeing more opportunities to deal with the orchestration question: "How do I tie together multiple Web services to help automate a specific business process?" You end up reusing those Web services in different contexts.

Carter: What types of applications have been successfully deployed at CA using this approach?

LeClair: Some of the key ones that we've enabled first are our "Customer Connect" applications. These give customers a connection to CA to help manage their own environments, and that falls into two areas. One is getting information about their status as customers, so they can maintain and update their own contacts or business contacts for the different CA products they use. This has been popular with our clients.

One of the other application types is on the support side, providing Web-based access to all of our support systems. So, those are the two that are driving a lot of volume. Over time, we'll extend this infrastructure so that you can not only acquire CA products, but also get parts and software delivered to you and installed on multiple platforms through this kind of connectivity.

Maintaining Data Integrity
Carter: What kind of methodologies for Web services have you developed to make sure that the integrity of data and data access isn't compromised?

LeClair: That's an excellent question. Today, we don't deliver direct access to the Web services to clients outside CA; the clients use the Web service, but they're essentially using it through a portal technology. We use Web services behind our firewall, but even then we have a variety of security products under our e-Trust brand, as well as PKI and access-control products. So, we use public key, for example, for our account-connect information. We give the customers the digital certificate so we know exactly who they are, and because there is, obviously, confidential information involved, as far as contracts and contacts and that kind of thing in the company.

Carter: So your portal is almost like an application server, where it sits in the middle and consumes the Web services, and then publishes out the data through the portal interface using your software?

LeClair: Correct. The portal itself is written in Java and runs in an application server. CA doesn't produce its own application server, so we use a Java application server. So, we integrate and certify a variety of application servers, and we do happen to run one. We also run a lot of this on Linux on the mainframe because we have a significant mainframe investment and expertise here at CA, and we can take advantage of some of IBM's new initiatives toward encouraging the use of Linux on a mainframe environment. We've found Linux to be a productive environment to deploy mission-critical applications.

Integration Insanity
Carter: Traditionally CA has grown by acquisition. What kind of challenges does that pose for you as an IT architect and manager, and how do you go about integrating all of these things without losing your mind?

LeClair: [laughter] Well, we have done a few acquisitions over the years, although not any really large ones for several years now. While CA has six of what we call "brand units," we do not organize the company into these sort of independent business units that have their own IT systems. We do an effective job of figuring out the best systems to run CA's operations, and when an acquisition happens, we have a well-defined practice of quickly converging on whatever systems the acquired company was working from and implementing a single support system. When we acquire another company, typically it has its own system for doing technical support for its customers, and we rapidly get the company migrated to and running on the same system with the rest of CA.

CA's value-add to the customer is that you've got one entity to deal with on a variety of products, you have the same interfaces no matter which product you use, and you get a lot of useful information delivered to you. Initially, we also look at the portfolio of any company we acquire. If it has a better solution in some area, then we'll use that.

Carter: How do the development and IT teams interact at CA? Do you "eat your own dog food"?

LeClair: One of the unusual things about CA is that we've changed the way we work. There used to be the development organization that developed products, and then there was IT. And like at many software companies, IT was getting essentially measured and compensated based on availability of systems and meeting service levels and that kind of thing.

This is important stuff to do, but we are an infrastructure-management company, in large measure, and we have storage and security and management. So a couple years ago, we instituted a slight alteration in the dictates of our IT shop, which is that it must use CA software if CA has a solution for anything that it wants to do. And not only do the IT folks have to use it, but they also have to put the beta releases of those products into production.

So, we go live with a huge variety of CA products on beta software, which serves an interesting purpose in that it tightens the activity between the IT and development organizations. Because [IT is] still essentially interested in providing a high service level, I think this change has helped raise the bar throughout all of the organizations because they have to be accountable to their peers: When they put a product out on beta, it must be ready to go and the last reality test before we ship the product.

So, this makes the two operations work together. It also helps to encourage the interaction between our IT organization and the product group, so they can help provide direct feedback early at the development cycle and help make the products better. I think that has helped remarkably in terms of improving the general quality of software. CA is also providing a good real-world experience for our products before our customers get them.

Carter: How do standards efforts impact your job at CA?

LeClair: We participate in all of the major standards groups. I personally happen to represent CA in the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I). I'm directly involved in making sure the things we do are compliant with the evolving WS-I standards, and making sure that what we're building is Webservices-interoperable. We're involved in key standards that tie back into our products, with people on board at CA actively involved in a variety of different groups, and we focus on making sure that our products comply. And, as appropriate, our IT solution will use those and be compliant with standards as well.

How to Decide on Java vs. .NET?
Carter: You mentioned Java vs. .NET—obviously, you guys support both camps there, but internally when you guys are building and deploying your own applications, how do you make the decision about which route to take?

LeClair: We don't have a formal standard where "everything will be Java." I think we take a realistic attitude and look at what we're extending. So, if you're extending an existing product that has a strong Microsoft affinity—you know, the whole product runs on Windows—then, naturally we continue to extend that in .NET. If it's something we need to deploy on multiple platforms, we'll be inclined to do it in Java.

Carter: What kinds of developments do you see impacting the way you do your job in the upcoming year or two?

LeClair:. I think that the general heading of utility computingor "computing on demand" as IBM likes to call it—is something where we're already far down the road at CA, and over the course of this calendar 2003, we're going to have some interesting new releases that will let you essentially have your systems be more significantly self-administrating and self-healing.

So, we'll be able to have a distributed environment where we have a stack of servers running one of our specific applications, another stack running another one, and based on the service level, we'll be able to dynamically reassign or reconfigure the network to make sure we're delivering the right capacity to the right system. This will be great for us from an IT perspective in giving us flexibility in how we deploy that, and it will be a positive thing for our customers as far as managing their environments as well.

About Don LeClair
Mr. LeClair is vice president and technology strategist in the Office of the CTO at Computer Associates. He is responsible for defining Computer Associates' global technology strategy for Web Services and information management solutions. With extensive experience in infrastructure, database, application development tools, and business applications, Mr. LeClair has worked closely with CIOs, analysts, and the press. He is a highly sought speaker on technology, and has represented CA on various standards bodies.

Mr. LeClair has held a variety of management positions in the development, field technical, and marketing organizations at CA. He advises on technical strategies and partnering opportunities with many software companies. Mr. LeClair earned an MBA from Boston University with a concentration in technology.