Computer Associates: Sexy? No. Profitable? You Bet

In Silicon Valley, Charles B. Wang would be considered a heretic. The CEO of software maker Computer Associates International Inc. restricts his workers' use of E-mail, which he says is used mostly for office politics as a "cover-your-ass tool." He shuns investment bankers but has made more than 60 acquisitions. When the company hit $1 billion in annual sales in 1989, Wang froze hiring, fearing that CA would lose its small-company culture. Believing that CA was being unfairly criticized, he cut off contact with Gartner Group Inc., an influential market-research firm that most high-tech companies kiss up to. ("I refuse to be blackmailed and extorted," he says.) And while his Silicon Valley peers are off chasing the Internet, Wang sees it as just another system for his company's software to manage. "Cool, with-it, and wired are not words you usually associate with CA," says Don DePalma, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

But smart, aggressive, and consistently profitable are. And from the unlikely base of Islandia, N.Y., the Long Island corporate enclave where CA is headquartered, Wang and his company are doing just fine, thank you. The company's 500 or so products are used in most big and midsize companies to do everything from crunch mainframe data to troubleshoot sprawling networks of computers. Think of them as software plumbing--the infrastructure that keeps big systems and big networks running.