The company's 29 August Annual General Meeting "is going to be liberation day for CA employees. It's to be liberation day for CA shareholders and it's to be liberation day for CA customers", said Texas investor Sam Wyly of his planned fight for control of the world's fourth largest software house.
Citing a customer survey which claimed to find "serious dissatisfaction" with the company, Wyly said CA was a prime candidate for a long-overdue organisational reshuffle.
"In Australia, we're concerned about two major constituents - our clients and obviously our staff," said CA's senior vice president and managing director of its Australia, New Zealand operations, John Ruthen, hitting back at Wyly's claims. "Feedback from our clients has been very minimal. We've had some inquiries from our clients but we've had no inquiries directly from our clients that has endorsed [Wyly] or asked us to answer the charges.
"We've had a very strong show of support from our staff who have been emailing management and emailing each other expressing their happiness in working for and with CA, as well as their own personal opinions as to the validity of what Mr Wyly is saying and doing."
Reading from a report titled "Uphill Battle for CA Proxy fight" compiled by research analysts Gartner Group, Ruthen said the company is buoyed by a market belief that the survey metrics used for Wyly's internal customer satisfaction report were flawed.
"It says 'Gartner disagrees with Wyly's survey method, particular in its comparison of CA to IBM and not CA's traditional competition'. I'm not exactly aware of how he surveyed or who he surveyed, but suffice it to say there seems to be sufficient commentary in the public forum to suggest that the survey method may suffer with examination," he said.
Adding to Ruthen's customer service confidence is CA's own ongoing series of customer and staff satisfaction surveys, which, he said, paint a rosy picture of its service and internal staffing policies.
"[Customer and staff satisfaction surveys] are not a new concept to us. In Australia, for the last umpteen years we've been very focused exactly on the issue of client satisfaction and client response to the way we do business. There's always things we can do better, and that's what the management team here is very focused on and we're confident that we're going in the right direction."
Potential company break up not a new idea
A major plank in Wyly's grand vision for a post-takeover CA includes breaking the company up into four business segments - storage, security, systems management and knowledge management - each with its own executive team.
According to Ruthen, however, this plan is nothing new and merely borrows from existing CA strategy that is already freely available in the public domain.
"Interestingly enough, in January of this year when we relaunched the branding of CA we moved to what we call a three-by-six strategy which is focusing our business on information infrastructure and e-business process. Underneath that, interestingly enough, are six focus areas, and four of them are what Wyly has picked up on," Ruthen explained.
"[Global CEO] Sanjay [Kumar] has a very public plan in place where he wants to unlock shareholder value in CA. Whether one of the mechanisms of doing that is floating off a company, that may be, but I don't think there's anything new in what Wyly is pitching there."
Quoting the Gartner report, Ruthen said the percentages of shareholder support will be the biggest barrier to Wyly's success, as Gartner estimates that CA has the support of at least 42 percent of its stake-holding constituents.
"Our internal discussions have centred around that same thing. Effectively, from a [success] perspective, he would need to achieve 51 percent of the vote out of 58 percent, which is something like a 90 percent hit. So it appears that a number of people are now taking the view that the likelihood of success if very difficult when he only holds one, or a little over one percent of the stock."
