CA dumps US-centric beliefs

NEWS In a major overhaul of its European operations, greater decision making power has now been given to the individual countries in the area, providing customers with a single point of contact within the company. The move reverses the decision six years ago to centralise CA into a "matrix" of three independent divisions focused on product areas. These were the information management group (databases and tools), the enterprise management group (Unicenter TNG) and the mainframe group (applications and tools for S390 servers). Each group previously had a head at the country level reporting to a head at European level, reporting to head in the US with little interaction between the groups at the European or country level. In a reshuffle last week, the company appointed Hayley Tabor as the area manager for Europe. Under her are managers for each major European country. Tony Martin, newly appointed country manager for the UK, said that while the three divisions "recognised the need for [employee] specialisation in CA's 1,244 individual products", the problem was now that "there was not a single point of contact that a client could talk to". Martin added: "We are confident that the changes mean we can now get closer to the customer and understand the client's needs better." Structurally, this means the UK pre-sales, customer relations, field marketing organisation and the sales organisation will be unified, reporting to Martin.