3Tera Acquisition Complete - Disruption Fuels CA Move to the Cloud

CA completed its acquisition of 3Tera today in what seems like a successive line of announcements about CA's push into the cloud as an infrastructure service provider.

In fact, the 3Tera announcement feels like yesterday's news in wake of the most recent announcement that CA is acquiring Nimsoft, the California based startup. Overall, CA has been a buying spree, acquiring a total of five companies in the cloud world. In addition to 3Tera and Nimsoft, CA has also purchased Cassatt, NetQos and Oblicore.

CA realizes that the halycon days of being an IT vendor are as solid as vaporous cloud. The real future is in adapting to the enterprise and its efforts to shed IT assets and move its applications to a cloud environment.

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The 3Tera and Nimsoft acquisitions exemplify this move.

3Tera

3Tera's AppLogic is a cloud management platform to move applications to a public or private cloud. It's widely viewed that AppLogic gives CA the ability to provide service providers with a set of management tools. It also gives 3Tera the capability to sell to enterprise customers. Some of the challenges concern the scope of AppLogic's virtualization capabilities. It is limited currently to the Xen platform. This could prove an issue as most companies have standardized on VMware. CA says it will broaden AppLogic's virtualization capabilities to VMware ESX and Microsoft HyperV.

Nimsoft

Nimsoft is a cloud management platform and benchmarking service. Cloud computing sounds fine and good but how it compares to on-premise applications can be a challenge to quantify. Nimsoft provides a unified monitoring environment for Google Apps, Salesforce.com, Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. Nimsoft also provides benchmarking tools that actually test and compare the differences, giving quantified results about the actual performance. The Nimsoft deal fits into CA's evolution as a

What's Next?

As stated on GigaOm, CA will hold its annual CA World event in May. We will learn more what is in store at that time. But we can expect to see its cloud strategy unfold a bit more, including SaaS services with upgrades at a pace that we see with SaaS providers.

The cloud management market is getting quite competitive but we have to keep in mind that customers are still a bit wary about cloud computing. And when companies are wary it means long decision making processes. And that means a longer sales cycle for the likes of companies like CA.

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