CA World 2011: Q&A: Russ Artzt, CA co-founder

Companies like Google and Yahoo have donated . You should see the big data code they've given for analytics.

There are some tremendous capabilities and some tremendous code out there in open source that we're taking advantage of. We think that business users and technical business users of the future are going to want to build their own cloud applications.

Once you stop innovating, as a company you go stale. That's certainly not my vision for my company.

We're building a cloud assembly product that will let you assemble composite cloud applications. We're creating a repository of services and you assemble [applications] from all the services that are available. For example, if you want to build an application, you can take services from different places and bring it together. It's like component building, like Lego. You take the components, build and assemble and you then you have an application.

In the cloud you're going to have many more applications than in the traditional space. Traditionally [businesses have] had relatively few but those ones have been mission-critical. Here you can literally have thousands. We're creating the concept of a bot that lets you build your own personal assistant for what you want to build as an application.

The idea of what we're doing is investing to get CA innovating into the future and to also help existing product development in some of our new areas. We partner a lot with Nimsoft and Arcot because those are two of our fastest growing businesses and they're emerging fast.

I believe customers will look to buy software more as a service and go with the PAYG model. As that happens we need to be ready.

Given you co-founded CA Technologies some 35 years ago, is it exciting for you to be involved in spotting new technologies and opportunities?

It is. Without new innovation any company is going to stagnate. It's the innovation that gets the juices going again. And we need it. In any industry, as technology changes and it certainly has in our industry the companies that jump on the new technology and make use of it and innovate and create new solutions are the companies that are going to thrive and do well. If you don't, once you stop innovating, as a company you go stale. That's certainly not my vision for my company.