He’d also been heavily recruited. Sources familiar with the situation told me that Swainson had been in line for a very senior and nearly identical job at Hewlett-Packard. Swainson didn’t return my call seeking comment, and spokesmen for HP and Dell declined to comment, as well.

Dell is launching the Software Group, it said in a statement, to build out its muscle on the software side as a complement to its overall mission of selling IT services.

And there’s probably no one better to do it than Swainson. Since 2009 he’s been an adviser at private equity firm Silver Lake Partners. But from 2004 to 2009 he ran CA with one single goal in mind: Rebuilding its reputation following an accounting scandal that ended when its prior CEO, Sanjay Kumar, was sentenced to 12 years in prison. The company paid $225 million to settle federal charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice.

But before CA, Swainson had spent 26 years at IBM. Among the things he did at Big Blue was spend seven years as general manager of its Application Integration Middleware division, which was a business he created. It was during those years that IBM launched its WebSphere family of products.

So that leaves just one question: Who’s going to run the HP software division that it had wanted Swainson to run?

Kumar alleges they were all aware of the infamous “35-day month” ploy for which he and eight other former CA (CA) officials took the fall. “Wang was not only aware of the accounting improprieties, such as the 35-Day Month, he also actively participated in concealing those improper accounting practices. … Wang knew that CA’s quarters were ‘open’ for five days into the next month per his directive, and he sometimes instructed CA to keep CA’s books ‘open’ after the usual ‘five days’ to execute license agreements and recognize revenue from those agreements in the previously ended quarters.”

Damning allegations and ones Wang, D’Amato, et al., vigorously deny.
Said a spokesman for Ranieri and D’Amato: “[Kumar] from jail continues to be a stranger to the truth.”