CA vice-president Una O'Neill is one of the few senior women managers in IT and is achieving record sales for services firm, writes John Collins.

It may not be politically correct to say it but, despite a few high-profile exceptions such as former HP chief executive Carly Fiorina, the technology industry is largely led by men. And geeky ones at that.

While the sector has opened up more to women in recent times, and created flexible working tools that allow women to return to work in other sectors, senior management at tech companies are still almost exclusively comprised of technically-minded men. Steve Jobs at Apple and Bill Gates at Microsoft are the archetypal chief executives, even if Gates has moved on.

So when a woman climbs the career ladder to become one of the senior managers at a multinational software company with annual revenues of over $3.5 billion (€2.7 billion), it is clearly something to be celebrated.

Even more impressive is the fact that the woman in question achieved her position after starting out in CA's (formerly Computer Associates) relatively small Dublin office and has turned around a troubled division at the company, which has had more than its fair share of accounting scandals in the last three years.

Interviewing Una O'Neill, senior vice-president for CA Technology Services on one of her rare trips back to Dublin, you are left with the impression that she would never paint her career in those terms. A highly focused and driven individual, she sees being a woman in a male-dominated industry as something that can be turned to her advantage.

"You can look on being a woman, and a young woman, in a male-dominated technology sector as a disadvantage," says O'Neill. "But personally, I actually think I've turned it into a differentiator. Initially, you stand out from the crowd but obviously you've got to show pretty quickly that you have credibility."

Credibility is not something that O'Neill has had a problem with. She graduated from Trinity College with a degree in computer engineering and joined PricewaterhouseCoopers, where she worked as a consultant. However, working for a broad-based management consultancy soon proved limiting and O'Neill moved to CA as a technical consultant in 1994.

"When you are in a pure play consulting organisation like PricewaterhouseCoopers, you are not necessarily a specialist in any one thing," explains O'Neill. "I was interested in becoming a bit more of a domain expert or specialist. CA provided that nice balance.

"Our business is all about more effectively managing IT. So you are going into manage the risk and the cost and trying to improve the service of IT. There's that kind of advisory or consulting aspect to what we do, but at the same time you get to be quite a specialist around one solution set."

CA quickly spotted her potential and, after stints heading up the pre-sales consulting teams in Ireland and then the UK, she found herself running the same organisation across the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region in 2000.

Working out of CA's London office, she managed a team of 400 consultants across the region and commuted from Dublin every week. Despite being married with two young children, O'Neill was determined to make the arrangement work.

"It's often about compromise in these sorts of things, but if you want something badly enough you make it work," she says.

Although O'Neill says her EMEA role provided her with relatively little interaction with CA corporate headquarters in New York, she obviously cropped up on senior management's radar.

In early 2003, she got a call from then chief executive Sanjay Kumar "offering me a wonderful opportunity to come and run our global professional services organisation".

CA had ramped up its professional services business during the height of the dotcom boom in an attempt to become a broad-based consultancy and not just one based around CA products.

Revenues had grown dramatically after the division was established in 1999, but disappeared again just as rapidly when the bubble burst a few years later. As a result, there was not a queue of executives looking to take over the troubled division.

"It had three different leaders in the three previous years, so it was considered internally a poisoned chalice and a bit of a rotating chair," says O'Neill. "So this 'great opportunity' was offered and it was something I had to think about a little bit. The opportunity to do something that hadn't been done before, and that others had failed at, intrigued me enough to want to try and do it."

Her husband Ali Murdoch, who founded online shopping portal, Buy4Now.ie, had always strenuously resisted moving from Ireland, but to her surprise, he acquiesced. Just as O'Neill seems to have a knack of turning a challenge into an opportunity, Murdoch saw his wife's promotion as an opportunity to establish a US subsidiary of Buy4Now.

She presented senior management with a three-year plan to turn the division around by making professional services a tool for enhancing CA products rather than supporting software from other vendors.

"That was the primary reason for failure in the past," she says. "The company had never truly answered whether it was to be an independent business or was it all about protecting and enhancing products."

The division lost $30 million on revenues of $230 million in the year before O'Neill took over but, by rationalising costs and focusing on the core business, it broke even in the first year of her management, and the following year, posted growth of 7 per cent and profit margins of 5 per cent.

In 2004, Kumar and other senior executives were charged with securities fraud, perjury and obstruction of justice related to a $2.2 billion accounting scheme at the company. He admitted to charges during the week that O'Neill was in Dublin.

"That's when my three-year plan came crashing down," remembers O'Neill. CA appointed a new chief executive, chief operating officer, marketing officer and head of sales, and all senior managers had to justify their roles.

"Everything I had done two years prior was very useful because I found myself doing it again," she says. She was clearly persuasive, as her three-year plan was left intact.

More importantly, she seems to have also hit the right note with CA customers. Her organisation now has annual revenues of $315 million, employs 1,500 staff, and in 2005, had its best year with a 26 per cent rise in revenues.

The CA division that O'Neill said was once the "red-headed stepchild" seems to have blossomed under her management.

Her next challenge is to build a network of partners that can provide professional services around CA products, in the same way that the CA strategy is relying less on direct sales. Of course, she's looking forward to a period of stability under new chief executive John Swainson.

"There has been a lot of change. What I take from the change is that you have to be adaptable to succeed in this industry and particularly in this company," she says.