Managing

Judy Kruntorad heads up IDMS R&D
at CA

“I started working in IDMS development in 1979,” she says. “In 1989 I became product owner for CA IDMS: essentially the job I’ve had ever since.”

After more than thirty-five years in software engineering, Judy Kruntorad relishes her work of heading up an R&D arm of CA, Inc (formerly Computer Associates, Islandia, NY), one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world.

As VP of software engineering and CA IDMS product line manager, Kruntorad oversees the company’s IDMS family of products, used at hundreds of high-profile organizations around the world. Developed in the 1960s, IDMS is a mainframe database management system. “It’s the foundation of many of our customers’ most critical business applications,” Kruntorad explains. “IDMS is now also being used as the back-end database server for modern Web applications.”

Fast and efficient
“The key advantages of IDMS are performance, throughput and efficient resource usage compared with competitive offerings. IDMS uses less CPU capacity and less storage to do the same amount of work,” Kruntorad says. “We have many customers that acquired IDMS in the 1980s, built their business applications around it, and still achieve excellent price performance.”

IDMS has a large family of supporting products like DB admin tools and open access interface facilities. “This series of complementary products means that IDMS can fully meet our customers’ needs,” she explains.

Kruntorad’s R&D organization includes product development, sustaining engineering, QA and product management. Her team members identify and implement new product requirements and also diagnose and fix product defects. She has a dozen direct reports, and notes that personal contact is very important to her, with both employees and customers.

Enjoying challenges
Kruntorad’s days are long, and often start with a meeting to review the status of her team’s current projects. She participates in phone conferences, Web-casts and meetings with customers; she may discuss product functionality and requirements, or learn about new corporate initiatives and make plans for implementing them. And she has to keep up with technology and the competition’s latest moves.

“I enjoy both the technical challenges and the people: the customers, my team and my colleagues across CA. I love working with IDMS because it’s such a flexible product and we have consistently been able to enhance it to integrate with the latest technology. Our latest release exploits a new IBM technology to help our customers lower their total cost of ownership.

“I have close relationships with many customers that started more than twenty years ago. I feel as though I’m part of their businesses. I like helping them to be successful and enjoy problem solving with them,” Kruntorad says.

The challenge of programming
Kruntorad grew up in Omaha, NE. Her dad was a draftsman for the City of Omaha and he encouraged her to “be curious about how things worked.”

Kruntorad graduated summa cum laude from Creighton University (Omaha, NE) in 1971 with a BS in math. She earned her MSCS in 1973 from Iowa State University (Ames, IA). At the time, she estimates, about 20 percent of CS students at the university were women. “I switched from math to CS because I enjoyed writing programs. I liked the challenge and the thought process required. Software development is such a practical application of technology; you can see almost immediate results,” she says.

“As a woman in this field I never felt discriminated against, but I never expected entitlement either,” she says. “My parents taught me to work hard, be goal-oriented and be curious about life and technology. Those have been my guiding principles.”

Into databases
Kruntorad started work as a programmer in the defense division of Sperry Univac (St. Paul, MN). She started on a San Diego, CA-based project to develop system software for Navy computers. Her next position was as principal investigator for a U.S. Department of Defense research project focused on database management technology. Her final job with Sperry Univac was doing development on DMS 1100, a commercial database management system.

In 1978 Kruntorad moved to Boston to work for MRI Systems Corp in technical marketing support for its System 2000, another commercial database system. MRI was acquired by Intel Corp shortly after she joined, and in 1979 she accepted a programming job at Cullinane Corp, later renamed Cullinet Software (Wellesley, MA), and started her IDMS development career.

Still building today
“I started as a developer on the ADS/Online product, a 4GL application development tool for IDMS, moved to project lead and eventually became development manager for ADS/Online, which is now called CA ADS. In 1986 I became manager of the IDMS QA organization and then in 1987 moved back to development, managing a group creating PC and Unix products for IDMS.

“When CA acquired Cullinet in 1989 I became the product owner for IDMS, and that’s the job I’ve had ever since. My responsibilities include keeping pace with technology and making sure the product is advancing to meet our customers’ requirements.”

IDMS release 12 in the early 1990s was a pivotal point for the IDMS product line, she notes. “We re-architected the database engine so it could support a relational data model as well as a network model. This enables customers to write applications using standard SQL relational access against their existing non-SQL defined IDMS databases.

“They can also create new SQL-defined IDMS databases,” Kruntorad explains. “This SQL relational technology lets IDMS quickly support new data access protocols like today’s SOA initiatives.”

D/C

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