As more companies adopt the cloud, this technology is opening a whole new range of opportunities for companies in the cloud space. In an interview to CXOtoday, David Dobson, EVP & Group Executive – Customer Solutions Group, CA Technologies, talks on the opportunities sin the cloud space and the changing role of the CIOs.

How has CA Technologies repositioned itself to address new market needs?
We are very excited about the year ahead. We are currently in our fiscal 11 just two months short of our fiscal 12 and this is a very exciting time for CA Technologies. We are one year in to executing our growth strategy, fundamentally we have repositioned our company in to new growth markets, primarily leveraging what we see as the major inflection point in the IT industry. The growth of virtualization has led to new opportunities for virtualization management across multiple platforms, which leads to the cloud opportunity we see that many of customers talk to us about. So we have repositioned our company to take advantage of core technologies that enable customers around the world to take advantage of the cloud opportunity. So we have invested in virtualization management, our service assurance capabilities, service management platforms, security and our core cloud platforms. We have a very large presence in India and we are working to that.

What are key drivers for the growth of the cloud?
There are three trends, one they need to be more agile that is be more adaptable to the environment. A lot of this was caused by this environment we went through last couple of years. Globally we went through a very significant economic disruption. Before that we saw the IT budgets growing, but now IT budgets are contained or declined and CIOs are expected to deliver more from less. So agility, lower cost and getting to market more quickly are the underpinning forces that are driving the growth for cloud computing.

How has the role of CIOs changed?
We see CIOs in large enterprises acting as IT supply chain managers, so rather than focusing on manufacturing operations where they are managing equipment and machines, they manage supply. Secondly, we see an important trend occurring in the mid-size market, where IT departments are becoming small and counting on IaaS to manage their hardware.

Are you planning on any new partnerships?
In the last six months we have really honed our focus on a smaller number of very important partnerships and over the course of the next few months and quarters, you will continue to hear more about some of the new partnerships we are forming.