CA Names New CTO, Acquires Agile Development Software Provider

CA Technologies has named Otto Berkes, former HBO chief technology officer and Microsoft development executive, to be the software company's new chief technology officer.

Berkes fills the post that's been vacant since January, when former CTO John Michelsen left to become chief product officer at Zimperium, a startup that develops security technology for mobile devices.

Berkes' appointment comes as CA makes several significant moves to bolster its product portfolio, including acquiring Rally Software Development Corp., a provider of Agile development tools and services, and debuting a new release of the CA Project and Portfolio Management system.

[Related: CA Shows Off Expanded IT Infrastructure Management Toolset]

CA, based in New York, has been undergoing some significant changes in the last year, rebuilding its channel program and overhauling its product strategy -- focusing its technology portfolio on IT and cloud management systems, DevOps and security.

Michelsen was CTO at CA Technologies for two-and-a-half years and was a senior vice president for one year before that, following CA's August 2011 acquisition of ITKO, which he had founded.

Berkes' appointment, announced this week, is effective June 15. He joins CA from HBO, where as CTO he managed the development of the HBO Go Streaming service and was responsible for all of the company's media production, internal business systems and technology operations.

Prior to joining HBO, Berkes worked at Microsoft for 18 years, holding a number of senior technology development posts, and was one of the four original founders of Xbox.

Late last week, CA acquired Rally Software Development Corp., a provider of Agile development software and services, in a move that significantly boosts its DevOps technology portfolio.

CA is paying $19.50 per share for Boulder, Colo.-based Rally, putting the value of the deal at about $480 million, net of cash acquired. The boards of both companies have approved the deal, and CA expects to complete the acquisition in its fiscal 2016 second quarter that ends in September.

Rally's technology offerings "complement and expand CA's strengths in the areas of DevOps and management Cloud," said CEO Mike Gregoire in a statement. "At the end of the day, this deal is about enabling speed and flexibility, about how we can make the most demanding enterprises truly agile."

IDC forecasts that the market for Agile application life-cycle management software will reach $1.1 billion by 2017.

And this week, CA unveiled a new release of CA Project and Portfolio Management, a cornerstone of the vendor's product portfolio, said James Harvey, general manager and senior vice president of the company's IT Business Management Division, in an interview.

"This is really our strategic foothold in IT," Harvey said. IT departments rely on PPM tools to manage all aspects of their IT projects, helping executives set IT strategies and allocate resources.

The new release offers built-in data warehouse and business intelligence capabilities that managers can use to perform multidimensional and trending analysis on PPM data. It's also possible to pull in data from other sources to augment the PPM data.

That resonates with Dan Greer, president of Rego Consulting in Salt Lake City, which provides consulting, upgrade and training services for CA PPM. He said one of the challenges with earlier releases was getting information into and out of the system. "This takes a huge step forward," he said, noting that customers can more easily extract information on their own for analysis with the new capabilities.

Harvey said the PPM release and Rally acquisition are linked in that CA PPM is used to set a company's IT strategy and the Rally tools are used to build applications to execute that strategy.

"I think that's really powerful and puts our channel partners in a better position to have a strategic advisory position with their clients," he said. It also dovetails with CA's positioning as helping customers with digital transformation -- the increasing use of software to manage various aspects of a business, such as how employees collaborate and how companies interact with their customers.

Greer said he hopes to hear more about CA's plans to more tightly integrate Rally with CA PPM and other CA products.

PUBLISHED JUNE 4, 2015