Unlike many product releases and version updates, CA's latest AllFusion ERWin Data Modeler is actually new.

The enterprise software company spent several years rearchitecting the product, even as it hit its greatest sales since CA acquired the product from Platinum Technology in 1999, and the AllFusion Modeling Suite r7 looks and feels new, which will mean a bump in adoption of the new version by old and new customers, CA and VARs said.

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"Many times you see vendors bring along a new version, with new functionality or a fixed bug," said Javed Matin, CEO of Myriad Solutions, of Silver Springs, Md., a CA reseller. "This time CA is presenting something totally new. They have totally changed the underlying architecture with [a Generalized Data Modeling engine]. That makes the product very desirable. All of a sudden it is easier to interface with other tools. It gives the customer more power. You don't have to stick to the tools of CA; you can use the XML interface."

Myriad produced a direct mail campaign promoting AllFusion r7 earlier this year, and the response has been encouraging, with a few leads developing, Matin said.

CA officials are pleased the overhauled version will initiate an early sales bump, but say the decision to revamp was more strategic than tactical.

The product has been a market leader for 10 years and had its best sales results since the CA acquisition of Platinum in the first quarter of 2006, but to maintain market relevance the product needed an overhaul, said Danny Sandwell, CA's product manager for database modeling.

"The product's been around since the 1990s, and especially in software that can be viewed as beyond a 'born on date,'" Sandwell said. "This is a 'what's next industry.' … We looked at our architecture and code lines and listened to customers and resellers. CA basically allowed us to make the decision to invest to make it hold for the future. It wasn't that we were losing sales. This wasn't sales-oriented."

Regardless, Sandwell called the r7 a sales "slam dunk" for resellers because it is easier to work with and integrates with multiple database applications, namely Oracle's 10G, which gets resellers into larger accounts.