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To: BostonView who wrote (3004)10/21/1998 6:50:00 PM
From: Doughboy  Respond to of 5232
 
Thanks for your summary. I listened to the CC myself, and have a couple of details to add:

--Sanjay used the adjectives "rock-solid" "fantastic" "great" to describe performance this quarter.

--Sanjay says the share price is very cheap (a "ridiculous value"). In the future, the share repurchase program is going to slow down, so don't expect CA to go in to prop up the share price as aggressively the rest of this calendar year.

--He said Unicenter growth more than made up for the flat mainframe revenue. He sees no pick-up in mainframe until the 4th Quarter (i.e., they're sticking to the prediction that mainframe will be flat for two quarters). In Q4, he's hoping that companies will loosen the purse strings and will make some big buys, so he thinks "some of that business will come back." From the sounds of it, CA will let mainframe drop off until client-server and services revenue swamp it.

--CA is trying to please analysts more. They "listened" and provided more info to analysts including a breakout of Trade Accounts Receivable, services revenue, and headcount. Sanjay was unapologetic about the July warning saying that they called it right and in hindsight he would do it all over again. He thinks others (IBM?) are hiding the weakness by steep discounting and borrowing from the future. The cheat sheets provided to analysts are at cai.com The ID is "analyst"; password "harmony." Good detail.

--A/R are running under 60 days. They seemed happy about that.

--Troubling North American sales. Most of the growth was overseas, and the mainframe business, other than one HUGE deal, was nothing to write home about.

--An analyst pointed out that TNG Unicenter growth was not especially impressive, 26%, Sanjay pointed out that it was mostly "stage 1" meaning that clients are just getting their feet wet and they are picking up the revenue stream in the future unless they screw up. Sanjay also said that he expects 25-35% growth in Unicenter revenue going forward.

--Commenting on IBM-Tivoli, he said that IBM made a big publicity splash and heavy discounting but Tivoli made no inroad against CA. He said that the industry viewed the Tivoli product as flawed ("TMA"--Too many architectures.) Sanjay also repeatedly implied that IBM was borrowing against the future to make their numbers.

--CA will make some big announcements this quarter about product upgrades.

--Sanjay closed by repeating all his positive comments but then he cautioned that he was not trying to get analysts to raise estimates. Given this conservatism, I don't think it is likely that we will see many upgrades by analysts until the 4th Quarter.

Doughboy.



To: BostonView who wrote (3004)10/21/1998 6:58:00 PM
From: Harry Landsiedel  Respond to of 5232
 
Boston View. Re: Conference call. First off, thanx for posting your comments on the call. I think moving to 50% of sales in server software in 4 years is an outstanding performance for which this company has not gotten enough credit.

Re: "On the warning: CA saw the train coming." Having seen many companies (See: BMC or BofA) dodge and weave when things might be getting tight, CA mgt stood up and told it like it was going to be. Since they were first, they got the arrow in their back. It also took courage in light of the recent stock award.

This action shows the caliber of this management IMHO, and it makes the repeated criticisms on this thread by some seem outdated and now downright wrong.

HL