CA Names Former IBM Executive Its New CEO

McCracken, 67, held a number of posts at IBM during a 36-year career at that company before retiring in 2001. He joined CA's board in 2005 and became non-executive chairman of the board in 2007. He has served as executive chairman since September 2009 when Swainson's retirement was announced.

McCracken's appointment was announced Thursday, just before a conference call to discuss the company's fiscal 2010 third-quarter earnings.

Speaking at the start of the earnings call, McCracken said he was asked earlier this week by CA's board members to take the company's helm. He said he had many difficult decisions during his career in the IT industry, "But to be honest, this wasn't one of them."

During his tenure at IBM, McCracken served as general manager of IBM's printing division and as a member of the Chairman's Worldwide Management Council. Earlier he was president of the company's EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) and Asia PC Company and, before that, as general manager of marketing, sales and distribution for the IBM PC Company.

Outside of IBM McCracken was a director at IKON Office Solutions and has been president of Executive Consulting Group LLC since 2002.

For the third quarter ended Dec. 31 CA reported sales of $1.13 billion, up 4 percent from the same period last year, while net income grew 1 percent to $257 million.

McCracken said sales increased in many of the company's key software product areas including security and access management, project and portfolio management, application performance management, and mainframe software management.

CA is also positioning itself as a leader in providing tools for managing cloud-computing and virtualization environments.

CFO Nancy Cooper said CA is forecasting that sales for all of fiscal 2010 will increase 2-to-4 percent to between $4.3 and $4.4 billion.