Adam Famularo wants his partners back. Plain and simple.
As senior vice president and general manager for CA’s Recovery Management & Data Modeling business unit, Famularo didn’t mince words in a recent interview with Channel Insider when he discussed the renewed momentum he’s seeing around the company’s back-up and recovery products and just how badly he wants partners who defected from CA several years ago back in the fold.

“We want those partners back,” he said. “We fell asleep at the wheel and Symantec took them from us. They did. So now, part of what we have to do is get them to trust us again.”

Resurrecting the trust factor has been a mission of Famularo’s, particularly over the course of this past year. He’s hired new blood in the sales and marketing organization, and instituted a number of changes to the partner program that he said have boosted margins and incentives to partners selling CA’s ARCserve and XOsoft products. He’s also providing ARCserve free for partners to use internally in a production environment, so they can see for themselves how the products perform.

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Among the other initiatives is a deal registration system that rewards partners with increasing margins as the deal progresses, including giving points for simply registering the deal even if the partner doesn’t end up closing it. If the partner does win the deal, there’s additional points plus an immediate rebate. This system, he says, has enabled partners to reap two-to-three times the profit margin – as much as 37 percent – on sales of ARCserve versus Symantec’s competitive offering, Backup Exec. The margin comes strictly on the product sale and does not include any services that the partner wraps in, he added.

Famularo is making noise now because he believes CA is finally emerging from a dark period when it disappointed its partners, didn’t pay attention to them, and ultimately saw them take their business elsewhere. Channel conflict has been a chronic CA pain point, but the recovery management products now go exclusively through partners via distribution, he said. Likewise all renewals remain the domain of partners and large account resellers use the same distribution model as the smallest partner, he added.

Next May, CA plans to launch ARCserve 15, which will include new cloud management capabilities. Famularo said CA views the cloud as just another back-up repository that customers can choose, along with disk and tape, and is positioning ARCserve as the solution that can retrieve that data no matter where it resides.

“The cloud is just another back up point,” he said. “It’s our job is to facilitate that and make sure you can backup and recover from those different points.”

He said that CA has no plans to become a cloud provider itself. “Some of our competition is going to build the cloud infrastructure and have everyone back up to them, but then they own the customer,” he said. “That’s not our approach at all. We want customers owned by the partner.”

There is no bigger competitor in Famularo’s sights than Symantec right now. As stated, he wants his partners back. He says he will honor whatever program level a partner has achieved with Symantec if they join the CA fold.

“We feel this is a prime opportunity to come back to CA and away from the competition,” he said.

Salvo fired.