CA posted some impressive numbers last night after the market closed.  They beat the consensus estimate for earnings per share, revenue, and cash flow.  Quite impressive given the current economic challenges that are facing the world and impacting IT budgets.

Digging a little deeper into their financials, one can see that CA has been reaping the rewards of being a strong player in the mainframe world, where revenues and maintenance subscription revenues continue to be strong.  Additionally, they are making investments in the security space as well through recent acquisitions as well as internal investments in this space.

CA has also publicly stated that that they are beginning to focus on the cloud computing space as well, so I would not be surprised to see some sort of strategic alliance or an outright purchase of a firm that specializes in the dynamic computing / cloud computing space.  CA’s products are well suited for emerging as a front runner in this space, given their mainframe roots.

As suspected, I have not seen that their attempts of marketing a product that is useful in the distributed space is not reaping the same revenue fruit as their mainframe business.  I would be really interested to know if there is anyone out there that is using the old Unicenter platform still, or has ventured into their systems management suite of products such as CA NSM, or their CA Cohesion Application Configuration Manager.  As I talk to my colleagues in the systems management space, I still hear the same story; CA is great in the mainframe world but is not the best solution for the distributed space.  Is this your experience?  Do you use these tools?  I would be interested in talking to you about your experiences with them.