CA India to up Hyd headcount by 1,500

Company to invest more on marketing

Computer Associates (CA) India plans to increase its headcount in its Hyderabad development centre to around 2,000 in the next 18 months.

The 100 per cent subsidiary of New York-based $3.2 billion Computer Associates International Inc has a current manpower strength of about 500.

Speaking to Business Standard, Chris Broderick, senior vice-president and general manager (BrightStor Business Unit), Computer Associates International, said: "The company has planned a two-fold approach for growth in India. One is to invest in marketing and the other is to increase our manpower strength in engineering and research and development for corporate purposes."

The company is constructing a new campus in Gachibowli, on the outskirts of the city, to meet the infrastructural requirements. The facility would be operational by next year, he said.

Broderick was in the city to launch the company's latest version of BrightStor r11.1 in India. "BrightStor r11.1, is a new generation of intelligent storage management solutions that enable enterprises to rigorously safeguard their corporate data assets with greater cost-efficiency than ever before," he said.

BrightStor r11.1 has been built around 13 integrated and enhanced products. The product is designed to better align storage spending with business value by supporting more than 100 storage arrays, tape libraries, storage area networking (SAN) switches, servers, operating systems, databases, and applications.

BrightStor r11.1 also helps to ensure the integrity and reliability of data protection across the enterprise.

According to Broderick, with the new solution, organisations can leverage their investments in storage infrastructure and devices by managing and protecting greater volumes of data across multiple platforms "" including Windows, Unix, Linux, NetWare, and mainframe z/OS "" in a better manner.

"The integration of BrightStor high availability with other BrightStor data availability solutions enables customers to leverage advanced automation and intelligence functionality to better protect Windows data and thereby support business continuity and disaster recovery," he said.

Broderick also said that BrightStor r11.1 solutions would be available under CA's FlexSelect licensing programme. The company is also offering BrightStor managed capacity pricing, a simplified licensing model based on terabyte capacity that eliminates the need to track server- or application-based licences.

Another feature of BrightStor r11.1 is that it provides the additional benefits of the company's enterprise infrastructure management (EIM) strategy through integration with the company's unicenter operations management solutions and eTrust security management solutions.

"This feature enables storage infrastructures to be managed as an integrated component of the overall enterprise environment, empowering companies to manage the full spectrum of resources that support specific business services and processes in a unified manner. Organisations can also more effectively and consistently enforce security policies and best practices across the enterprise to protect data from viruses and other threats," Broderick said.

The company plans to launch the first version of EIM strategy by the end of December 2004. "Moving forward EIM will be the underlining architecture for all future product releases from the company," Broderick said.