When you talk to your customers, what's the one thing they praise CA for, more than anything else?

They really like our products. We have enormous loyalty around product. And there are some tremendously strong personal relationships between parts of the organization and our customers.

What's the one thing they criticize the most, the thing they most often say you need to change?

A lot of them say, 'We need you to move faster on getting EITM to realize the vision. We need to have the pieces connected better, we need to have more integration between this and that.' So each of them has a specific thing that he would like us to do. Many of them have ideas about how could you market this better. A lot of them are very interested in what are we doing to help them with some of the new technology areas, whether it's SOA or mobile/wireless stuff.

What's the best decision you've made since you became CEO of CA?

I'm very happy with the management team that we've hired. It took time to find the right people for those jobs. I'm very happy with the decision to create EITM, notwithstanding your open letter to the contrary, because I think it gave the company and it gave customers a rallying cry. It gave us an umbrella under which we can put a lot of things. I'm very happy with some of the acquisitions we've made.

I think the reorganization of the sales force was a critical decision that we made at a very difficult time. If you remember, this time about a year ago we had really screwed up our whole commission process. While unrelated to the organization of the sales force, that was causing churn and consternation in the sales force because no one knew if they were going to get paid or how much they were going to get paid. We looked at that and said, 'This is a big problem, we have to fix it. But at the same time we also have a sales force that's organized wrong. Let's organize them around products, not relationships. And since we completely screwed this thing up, we might as well take the extra time and organize it the way we want it.' So we bit the bullet and did the reorganization of the sales team between June and September of '06. It got back on its feet again.

And the worst? I told someone once that I thought we would have everything sorted out in a couple of years. That may not have been a decision, it was just a really foolish comment. And it certainly reflected a little bit of my naivete about how challenging a process it would be.

What's your biggest headache right now?

I don't think I have any headaches in the sense of huge things to fix. There are a lot of business issues that we need to work on. We still have an awful lot of work around reengineering the business processes at CA. CA didn't have normal processes that a company of its size would have. It had processes of a company a quarter, a third, or a tenth its size. It behaved like a small business. And if you think about the way small businesses behave, they entrust a lot of power to individuals, they don't have well-defined processes for those individuals to make decisions. This is, to some extent, tied up with [Charles Wang's] view of how the business should operate, and the company overran that in terms of size and scale. So getting well-defined processes in place is still a huge priority for us, and will continue to be for a couple years.