In another time, an acquisition by CA Technologies (back when it was Computer Associates) caused industry watchers to speculate about the company’s motives and its technologies’ future development. In 2010, the high-tech industry gets why CA Technologies completed the purchases of technology providers NetQoS, Oblicore, Cassatt, Nimsoft and 3tera. The company is building a technology portfolio that can manage the network, application and server foundation as well as control IT services into the cloud.
Forbes.com Friday published an article entitled “What cloud computing means” and with it, named 10 companies as “cloud leaders.” CA Technologies landed on that list alongside industry giants such as Microsoft, Google, VMware and Salesforce. (Remaining five companies are: Amazon Web Services, IBM, Rackspace, Terremark and RightScale.) CA Technologies is quoted in the article’s slideshow as recently buying “its way to the forefront of cloud computing with the acquisitions of 3tera, Cassatt, NetQoS and Oblicore, each of which had technology for managing a different aspect of the cloud environment.”
For industry watchers, the acquisition of 3Tera earlier this year solidified CA Technologies’ intent to be a competitor in the cloud market. The company had pointed to cloud computing motivations with previous acquisitions, but 3Tera had the technology that proved to market analysts that CA Technologies has a solid strategy to take on cloud computing and help its customers do the same. According to the Forbes.com report, “the AppLogic tools created by 3tera are used by hosting companies to configure and manage multiple servers that must work together to support a cloud application.” And for Forrester Research Principal Analyst James Staten, the buy marked CA Technologies serious entry into the cloud space.
“If anyone doubted CA Inc.’s intention to get into the cloud computing market, you can’t get away with that skepticism anymore. This company is serious. Its acquisition of early cloud leader 3Tera takes their nascent cloud entreaties to an entirely new level,” reads a blog post from Staten and Forrester colleague senior analyst Glenn O’Donnell from February 2010. “3Tera was one of the poster children of the emerging Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market when its AppLogic platform was deployed across a collection of service providers as the basis for their cloud solutions. The company since has grown this into a network of more than 30 service providers across the globe, and a small collection of enterprises who use its software to power their clouds. As a cloud infrastructure platform, that’s a substantial lead-in market penetration compared to the other favorites such as Eucalyptus, Enomaly and of course, VMware vCloud Express.”
Now as CA Technologies continues to build on its cloud strategy with products announced at last month’s CA World 2010 conference and updated partnerships with fellow vendors and cloud enthusiasts, the market it watching to see what’s next.
“But this isn’t simply a market acquisition for CA. It’s a foundational move that it can now integrate with other CA products and technologies including Spectrum Automation Manager, its server provisioning and management product, its IT service catalog and its application performance management suite to give service providers a strong set of end customer tools for managing their cloud (and traditional hosting) deployments,” the Forrester Research blog goes on to say.
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