Latest CA tools get a cautious welcome

Computer Associates' latest product roadmap was given a warm but guarded reception by one of its major UK customers yesterday.

Alistair Quigley, head of IS for coach operator, National Express, welcomed CA's commitment to developing 3D graphical management systems as outlined by CEO, Charles Wang, in his keynote speech at CA World, New Orleans. However, there are elements of the new product strategy which he said he will not use, at least for a while.

Quigley, a user of CA's Ingres database and Open Road application development tool, admitted that the CA software he currently uses is critical to his firm's operations, but said CA has not quite hit the mark with two new products aimed at his market. These are Unicenter Fleet Management System and Neugents, a predictive management product based on neural networking.

He said: "Nugents is exciting. It would be great if we could predict the passenger loading on any given route on any given day. But we are not looking at it at the moment. These neural agents are only as good as the developer makes them, which means there is going to have to be a lot of background development work to get something which can make accurate, effective predictions."

Quigley also said he will not be looking at CA's Unicenter Fleet Management software, based on the company's flagship systems management product. "There is no business application for us because we don't own the vehicles," he said. "We have many suppliers of vehicles, but a lot of them are so small that they could never afford to buy this application." He added this would be the same for any other transport operator which owns infrastructure but not the vehicles that run on it, such as the UK's Railtrack.