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January 2, 2008 |
CA Labs funnels money to university researchers worldwide. With some of that money now flowing into Canadian schools, we asked the head of CA Labs about Canada’s research cred
By Peter Wolchak
 Computer Associates spends a lot of money on R&D: the company invested US$697 million in 2006 alone. But back in 2005, Gabriel Silberman thought there was more the management software company could be doing. At the time, CA’s R&D funding was tied to product development. The goal was to improve its products to generate more revenue, so R&D was built on an 18- to 24-month time frame.
Silberman, then in charge of worldwide R&D sites at IBM, believed taking a longer view would generate fresh, revolutionary software engineering innovations, so in 2005 he founded CA Labs. The group funds university researchers and brings faculty and students into contact with CA’s own experts.
This creates a cross-pollination environment in which smart people from both industry and academia identify—and hopefully solve—the toughest problems in the software management industry, Silberman said. While the goal is the same—generating value for customers, and thereby revenue—CA Labs tends to look five years down the road.
In June 2007, CA committed US$1 million over three years to fund research at five Canadian universities. We sat down with Silberman, senior vice-president and head of CA Labs, to discuss software innovation and Canada’s place on the global stage.
Backbone: How is this project valuable for the different players?
Silberman: There is always a potential economic value and then there is a value that is less tangible than dollars, and that is access. What I can offer to our collaborators is to work with experts from the CA side who can give them a business perspective: “we would never bring this to market” or “we could bring this to market.” So the ability to bounce things off business people who are in the trenches is extremely valuable. The second benefit is they can try out their ideas on real systems. If they want to try a new way to manage identity, for example, they do not have to create an entire environment from scratch, they can use our products, our source code, and simply implement a new module. Not only that, they can test their ideas against real data, and that value goes well beyond the actual cash contribution.
Backbone: CA Labs has been in existence for two years now. Any success stories?
Silberman: Yes, there have been a few. Australia was the first to get going with us and one of their projects is a data mining system for role-based access control. In an existing enterprise there are multiple systems and what you need to do is federate and rationalize access to those systems. So a user will authenticate once for access to the system and all the permissions will follow from that. That’s what you want to do, but the biggest problem is to extract those roles in the enterprise and know what each of those roles means, in terms of access. So if you are the company’s comptroller, you should have access to all the financial systems, but also to related systems like HR and payroll. If you’re the CIO or CFO, you need access to a different set of systems. But people may have one role today and that changes over time, so people often have access rights granted (based on the new job) but in many cases the old access rights are not removed or cleaned up. So it is extremely difficult and expensive to extract the information on who should be able to do what, but it turns out a lot of that information is already accumulated in (application usage) logs. So you can go into the logs and extract, for each individual, what their roles are and what their access should be.
Backbone: So, look at what they are doing in order to figure out what they should do?
Silberman: Yes, and the way you do that is through data mining. You take those logs, federate them and then conduct data mining on them. Of course, you then need to adjust for things like access people have had that they shouldn’t, but what you can now do is present to the management, for example, an Accountant Level 1 profile and say “Okay, this is what should happen for this position,” you authenticate that and then create access for all individuals in that position.
Backbone: How about a Canadian example.
 Silberman: CA acquired a company called Cybermation and they do job scheduling. They had been working on a research project, looking at recovery, that got folded into CA Labs. Job scheduling sets up jobs that may take place weekly or daily or every few hours, and some of these depend on the results of previous jobs. So what happens when a job fails: how do you recover, when do you restart? To do this automatically is extremely difficult, so the approach of this project was to do it semi-automatically: when things fail, a new schedule would be created automatically and a person would have to confirm that this made sense. But the smarts was in creating the schedule intelligently enough that the likelihood a person would say “Yes, that makes sense” is very high. And we are now hearing from our customers that this is exactly the type of thing they want, and we have this research ready to go and we’re going to put the research and our product together.
Backbone: There is concern in Canada about our perceived lack of innovation. Because of the international nature of your job, what is your opinion of research and innovation here, relative to the rest of the world?
Silberman: I think the quality of the research in Canada is extremely competitive and the researchers themselves can be compared to the top researchers around the world. Where Canada has a problem is in terms of resources. Canada is an interesting country in that when you become a university faculty member you are pretty much guaranteed some resources, so the resources are spread quite evenly. Because of that, you can have very ambitious projects that require lots of people or lots of equipment and may have trouble getting them. In the U.S., resource allocation is very uneven: some people will get a lot of resources, some won’t get any. But then if you look at the quasi-governmental funding organizations that Canada has set up, they are very well thought out. There are multi-year budgets, so you don’t have to go begging for money every year. Because of that, I use Canada as an example when I am in other countries, because researchers elsewhere may have a lot of money one year and then none the next.
Backbone: On a related topic, we seem to be moving toward a model in which innovation is a measurable national resource, like wood or oil. What is your sense of innovation as a global competitive measure?
Silberman: It is obviously a competitive factor, but it is only one of them. You could measure the number of start-ups, the number of millionaires, etc. But innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It has to have more than just the ability to innovate: it needs an innovative workforce, it needs the right physical environment, whether that’s taxation or other governmental programs. Look at Ireland. It went from being the poorest country in Europe to having the highest per-capita income, and that’s in 10 years. That’s amazing, but they didn’t get there only because of innovation.
Backbone: There is a sense in Canada that we have smart people with great ideas but, like in the entertainment industry, if you’re really good you have to go to the States because an idea is not going to be realized or actualized here. It will only be commercialized by an American company, or indeed a company like CA.
Silberman: Well, to talk to the CA angle, we have a couple of local development labs here in Canada, and that speaks to the talent that is present in this country, and the mission of those labs is not Canadian missions, they are worldwide missions. So that is a channel for innovation that feeds back into Canada because we work with local universities, we hire more people here if the business is going well, and we create more knowledge. So I don’t see this as stealing know-how. In terms of things being invented here and then going to the U.S., you have a curse: you are geographically next to America and it is extremely easy to simply step across the border and work in the U.S. But I have always claimed that brain drain is not a bad thing if you look at it over the long term. If someone goes to the U.S. and works there, that person gathers a lot of know-how and experience and, in a lot of cases, that person comes back. My contention is those same people, having spent those same years in Canada, would not be as valuable because of the knowledge they gathered in the U.S.
So the problem is not people leaving, it is how you get them to come back.
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