John Swainson took over Computer Associates (CA) in November 2004, six months after former chief executive Sanjay Kumar resigned pending accounting fraud charges for which he received a 12-year prison sentence.

Despite the upheavals, CA retained its place as the fourth largest software company in the world, with revenue of almost $4bn (£2.05bn) last year and 15,000 employees across the world.

Who are CA’s customers today?

Our market is 60 per cent in the US and 40 per cent overseas, with 22 per cent in Europe. We are in three major vertical sectors ­ – 40 per cent financial services, 20 per cent public sector and 20 per cent other technology companies.

On the whole our customers are very large IT users. So we do the most intensive and complex installations, then help customers manage them.

Are there plans to expand into new markets?

We have been in India for more than 10 years now, selling mostly to software companies and the larger multinationals.

But the subcontinent’s domestic market is shifting. Traditionally, labour was cheap and IT was not used as efficiently as it could be. Now labour is more expensive, so the technology needs to become more efficient.

We also work with companies there that want to operate on a wider scale and expand internationally. And though we do not sell much in Russia and China, we do business with companies there looking to extend multinationally as well.

With the focus on major installations, is every contract a bespoke service?

The nature of commercial software is that you try to sell a standard solution.

Our software is integrated with customers’ systems, but we still try to keep the bespoke element to a minimum.

But every customer is different. So if you look at the 10 biggest banks, you will find that we have had to integrate our core product with them in different ways.

What is your view on the question of how to establish a positive relationship between supplier and customer?

Effective dialogue is crucial.

For example, mission-critical services now operate at 99.5 per cent reliability. But an online banking service needs better service than that.

So the question is whether it is worth charging a lot more to push reliability up that extra half per cent, or better to save a lot of money by agreeing that 99.5 per cent is good enough.

To make the right call and avoid disagreement, you have to talk to customers constantly.

Are you concerned about the credit crunch?

We are not immune to macro-economic changes, but, touch wood, the crunch has not affected us yet.

Our software is not really discretionary. Businesses that use it cannot do without it, and all our contracts are done on a long-term subscription basis.

So we are somewhat protected ­ – both by the nature of that business model and the nature of what we sell.

What can you do to strengthen the business at such an economically uncertain time?

We want the ability to operate strategically and become more efficient. That is, to provide a higher level of service at a lower cost.

We are re-engineering our business processes and trying to move to a more lightweight infrastructure. And we are making our financial systems more efficient by benchmarking ourselves against the other big vendors.

Both SAP and EMC now offer their applications on demand over the network ­ – so-called software as a service (SaaS). Do you subscribe to the view that utility computing is an inevitable development?

There is much debate at the moment in the IT industry over whether a utility model will eventually emerge, but it is a lot more of a complex model than people think.

Some elements are helping the move ­ – high-speed fibre is now available, and we have better software to manage this kind of system. A customised, neat, secure, shared infrastructure will all help move in that direction.

But it is difficult because you have to manage data separately and use a common infrastructure in a secure way.

Smaller companies will tend to buy IT services the way they use electricity. But it is a different picture for large banks and the private sector.

What is the biggest challenge on the horizon?

Managing complexity well is going to be the big challenge.

The cost of hardware and software is about 15 per cent of the IT budget – ­ all the money goes on the labour it takes to programme and operate these big systems. And the complexity comes from co-existing and remixing old and new systems.

The buzz about SaaS is that it could allow you to change one thing in an isolated way ­ – which would save a lot of time and money.