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CA, Inc. (nasdaq: CA), formerly, Computer Associates, Inc., is a multinational computer software corporation headquartered in Islandia, New York. More specifically, it develops and markets information technology (IT) management software, which it sells both directly via its sales team and indirectly via systems integrators, value-added resellers, and other service providers.

The company articulates its vision of how enterprises can harness the power of IT through what CA calls Enterprise IT Management (EITM). EITM divides into three broad categories across distributed or mainframe environments:

• Govern – Help make better decisions by giving enterprises insight into their IT investments and risk from a single place.
• Manage – Make it easier to manage technology so that high-quality IT services can be delivered at a competitive cost.
• Secure – Ensure secure access to the information, applications, systems and services needed to conduct business.

CA, which posted $4.3 billion USD in revenue for fiscal year 2008 (ending March 31, 2008), maintains 150 offices in more than 45 countries. The company employs 13,700 people (March 31, 2008) ), including 5900 engineers. The Software Top 100 — an independent initiative — ranks CA as the seventh-largest software company in the world by 2007 revenue. CA holds more than 600 patents worldwide, and more than 1,000 patent applications are pending.

HistoryCA HistoryCompany History

Inception and early years

Headquarters on Long Island In 1969, under regulatory pressure, IBM announced its decision to unbundle the sale of mainframe computers from computer programs and support services. (At this time, the computer industry was dominated by mainframes, principally from IBM.) The decision opened new markets to competition and provided an opportunity for entrepreneurs to enter the nascent software industry — an opportunity that Charles Wang and his friend and business partner Russ Artzt exploited by creating a company to develop and market mainframe software, and they developed several products for the mainframe market, with modest success. In 1976, they obtained the North American distribution rights for CA-Sort, which had previously been distributed by Pansophic Systems under the name PanSort. CA-Sort was originally developed by a Swiss company named Computer Associates, which had been founded by Sam Goodner and Max Sevcik several years earlier. CA-Sort had found success in Europe, but sales in North America hadn't kept pace. Wang and Artzt established a new venture (in partnership with the Swiss company), which they named Trans-American Computer Associates, and went to market with CA-Sort, along with their original products.