CA's Cloud Acquisition Streak Adds WatchMouse Cloud, Mobile App Monitoring

CA Technologies' cloud strategy

The WatchMouse buy comes amid a two-year push by CA to amass a cloud computing army. Over the last two years CA has spent well over $1 billion acquiring cloud computing companies as it seizes the cloud computing market, and many of those acquisitions have made it into a new portfolio of cloud products from CA. The terms of the WatchMouse deal were not disclosed.

According to CA, adding Netherlands- and San Francisco-based WatchMouse to the mix gives the Islandia, N.Y. tech giant a tool to let customers safeguard the performance of their cloud, mobile and Web apps. WatchMouse leverages a globally-distributed infrastructure of more than 60 monitoring stations in more than 40 countries and replicates user transactions from these locations to provide insight into application performance and availability.

CA said cloud and mobile application monitoring features will boost the capabilities of its Service Assurance and Nimsoft plays and enable users to proactively manage end-user experience; identify and resolve application performance issues quickly; and ensure cloud vendors hold up their SLAs. CA acquired Nimsoft in March 2010.

"As companies extend more applications to their customers through the Web and smartphones, the performance of those applications is having a greater impact on revenue, customer loyalty and brand value," David Dobson, executive vice president, CA Technologies, said in a statement. "By adding WatchMouse to our industry-leading portfolio of solutions for managing and monitoring IT, we are enabling these companies to better safeguard the performance of these customer-facing applications -- so they can better safeguard the performance of their business."

CA said that because WatchMouse is delivered as SaaS, it is subscription-based and requires no up-front payment and no long-term commitments.

WatchMouse will augment CA's Application Performance Management (APM) offering and give large enterprises new ways to manage cloud, mobile and Web apps in a single solution set. It will add application response time monitoring to CA's Nimsoft IT Management-as-a-Service strategy, the company said. APM is an around-the-clock transaction monitoring play that monitors in physical, virtual, cloud and mainframe environments and lets users identify, prioritize and resolve performance issues before they can affect applications.

CA said WatchMouse will be sold as an add-on to the full-featured CA APM offering and it will be sold as a standalone capability to Nimsoft Monitor, CA's IT management solutions.

WatchMouse is the latest CA cloud acquisition and follows on the heels of the company's $330 million acquisition of Interactive TKO Inc. (ITKO), a provider of service simulation offerings for developing applications in composite and cloud environments, in June. CA has said that it will continue to acquire cloud companies as it grows and competes in the cut-throat cloud computing marketplace.