CA Cloud Spending Spree Continues With $330 Million ITKO Purchase

CA Technologies' cloud spending spree

According to CA, the $330 million all-cash deal, which is expected to close within the next three months, gives Islandia, N.Y.-based CA a new offering to help customers move to the cloud more quickly and speed time-to-market for composite applications and services. It also fills a hole in CA's portfolio for IT management, which has become critical to deliver high-quality business services. The addition of Plano, Texas-based ITKO gives CA the tools to extend IT management throughout the entire service delivery lifecycle and enables it to help customers overcome the limitations of current organizational approaches by breaking down the silos across development, testing and operations.

"The addition of ITKO to CA Technologies will extend our ability to deliver a complete set of capabilities to help our customers and partners to increase their adoption and value from cloud-based applications," David Dobson, executive vice president, Customer Solutions Group at CA, said in a statement. Dobson added: "ITKO's technology allows customers to anticipate how their applications will perform in alternate environments, significantly reducing risk, and accelerating their time to value. Together, we believe we will offer the broadest continuum of IT management solutions -- one that spans planning to production, emphasizes the service over the infrastructure, and accommodates the new heterogeneity that includes on-premise, cloud and hybrid application environments."

CA also adds a proven cloud force with ITKO, which closed out the 12-month period ending March 31 with revenues of roughly $39 million, which was double the previous 12 months. ITKO has built its business around the LISA solution, which lets companies build a mock up of a service at enterprise speed and scale while the service is in development. LISA virtualizes an environment by simulating the behavior of external services without invoking them to present "what if?" capabilities and provide insight into how an application might behave under various sets of circumstances.

CA said it will tie ITKO LISA in with its offerings for service assurance, service automaton, service management and turn-key cloud computing.

The ITKO acquisition is the most recent in a string of high-profile cloud acquisitions as CA bulks up its presence in the increasingly competitive cloud computing game. In 2010, CA made a host of key cloud acquisitions which pushed its cloud computing spending to above $1 billion. That string of acquisitions included high-profile cloud players like performance and monitoring vendor Nimsoft and turnkey cloud provider 3Tera.

The company has also plotted an action plan for the channel and MSPs to leverage the cloud. CA's Cloud Computing Director Adam Famularo has said that CA plans to keep its cloud computing momentum going through 2011.

Along with acquiring cloud computing vendors, CA has also scooped up cloud solution providers to build out its cloud profile. In April, CA acquired Base Technologies, a McLean, Va.-based virtualization management, cloud and managed IT player that has a growing list of federal, commercial and health-care customers, focuses several facets of IT focusing on the management of government IT assets. And in August 2010, CA bought 4Base, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based privately held cloud infrastructure and virtualization consulting firm.