CA Augments Cloud Business with Nimsoft Buy
CA has announced plans to purchase Nimsoft for $350 million, thus furthering its bolstering of cloud computing capabilities. CA’s series of cloud-related acquisitions already includes Cassatt, NetQS, Oblicore and 3Tera.
On March 10, CA officials announced the $350 million, all-cash acquisition of Nimsoft, revealing that the deal is predicted to close by the end of the March. Nimsoft is the fifth cloud-centric company CA has purchased in the past year, showing CA’s continued aggressive move to build up its cloud computing capabilities.
With the acquisition of Nimsoft, CA gains IT performance and availability monitoring solutions for highly virtualized data centers and cloud computing environments as well as greater traction in key areas like midmarket companies and emerging global markets. CA refers to midmarket companies as emerging enterprises: companies with revenues between $300 million and $2 billion.
CA CEO Bill McCraken said in a conference with analysts and journalists that the deal is about Nimsoft’s technology and customers—of which the company has 800 scattered in over 30 countries. “We want to reach new customers, and we want to reach them in a way we haven’t been able to do here at CA, even after a couple of tries,” said McCraken.
McCraken said that the emerging enterprise space will account for approximately a quarter of the software spending in CA’s market by 2010. Cloud computing for business is provided by MSPs and McCracken said that the cloud is poised to play a major role in emerging economies.
Executive vice president for CA’s Cloud Products and Solutions Business Line Chris O’Malley said via a conference call, “We are looking to build up that off-shore revenue.”
In addition to a variety of public cloud computing environments, Nimsoft’s monitoring and reporting products are used with on-demand offerings like Google Apps for Business, Amazon Web Services, Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), the Rackspace Cloud and Salesforce.com. CA also reports that Nimsoft’s monitoring and reporting products are used by customers for internal applications, databases, and physical and virtual data centers.
MSPs are granted high visibility into customers’ business applications in internal and external infrastructures with Nimsoft’s Unified Monitoring Solution. Nimsoft president and CEO Gary Read and McCracken said that Nimsoft’s technology is created with a high level of automation in order to make it easy to use for MSPs.
Read will become senior vice president and general manager of CA’s Nimsoft business unit when the deal with Nimsoft is finalized. Read said that combining his company—which is 12 years old—with Nimsoft makes sense. Although Nimsoft had done well, Read worried that the company would struggle to stay up to speed with the market changes. Nimsoft will be able to continue with innovation while scale its products easily once part of CA. Most Nimsoft employees are expected to remain with the company once the deal with CA is complete.
CA has acquired Cassatt, NetQS and Oblicore in less than a year and is in the midst of purchasing 3Tera. Each company pushed Ca further into the cloud and Nimsoft will add to CA’s capabilities in the cloud. In McCraken’s words, acquisitions like the current purchase of Nimsoft serve to “accelerate CA’s market leadership.” To learn more about Cloud Computing, please visit Nubifer.com.
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