CA's Cloud Computing Spending Spree: 6 Acquisitions, 14 Months, $1 Billion

Buying Into The Cloud

CA Technologies is on a hot streak and is going all out to get into cloud computing. Over the past 14 months the tech giant has amassed through acquisition a small army of cloud computing companies to build out its cloud strategy. All told, CA's spending on cloud-focused acquisitions is hovering near the $1 billion mark. And there's no sign of CA hitting the brakes any time soon.

Here, we take a look at the six cloud-focused acquisitions Islandia, N.Y.-based CA has made over the last several months and how it plans to add it to its cloud computing arsenal.

Arcot Systems

CA on Monday acquired advanced authentication and fraud prevention player Arcot Systems Inc. in a $200 million cash deal. Arcot's software is available both as a cloud service or deployed on-premise. CA plans to combine Arcot's technology with its CA SiteMinder portfolio will enable CA to offer advanced capabilities for customers to reduce risk, support regulatory compliance and confidently secure business transactions.

CA's acquisition of Arcot , CA said, will give partners the ability to offer advanced authentication as a cloud service, or resell it.

Arcot, Sunnyvale, Calif., also fall in line with CA's cloud computing security strategy, which will extend its existing on-premise Identity and Access Management (IAM) offerings into the cloud. The goal for CA is to handle security to the cloud, for the cloud and from the cloud. The Arcot buy takes the from the cloud portion.

4Base

In mid-August, CA acquired 4Base, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based cloud computing infrastructure and virtualization consulting firm.

CA has said that 4Base will become the pivot point for its Virtualization and Cloud Strategy group, a competency practice within CA's Services Division. CA will leverage 4Base's consulting chops to help move customers quickly and pragmatically from virtualization to cloud computing through advice and implementation. It will also eliminate the complexity of making the leap into the cloud, CA has said.

CA foresees 4Base giving CA customers a range of services including virtualization operations readiness assessments, virtualization capability assessment and strategy and cloud-based advisory services.

The terms of the 4Base deal were not disclosed.

Nimsoft

CA acquired Nimsoft, a developer of IT performance and system availability monitoring technology, back in March in a deal worth $350 million in cash.

Adding Nimsoft to its cloud computing fold gives CA IT monitoring capabilities in both public and private cloud computing environments. Meanwhile, CA can also expand sales to managed service providers.

Nimsoft's Unified Monitoring software monitors and reports on cloud systems like Rackspace, Amazon and others.

The Nimsoft buy also followed CA's September acquisition of NetQOS for $200 million, a purchase that adds CA's network performance management and service delivery capabilities.

3Tera

CA needed a private cloud platform as it continued to build out its cloud computing offerings. In February, CA acquired 3Tera, which makes a platform called AppLogic that lets users build cloud services and deploy applications to public and private clouds via its user interface. 3Tera represents a turnkey cloud platform for IT departments, solution providers and service providers to quickly and easily build and deploy cloud applications.

Neither company disclosed the financial terms of the acquisition.

3Tera and AppLogic give CA's cloud infrastructure a cloud enablement offering that can simplify the design and deployment of applications in the cloud. Integrating AppLogic with its other recent acquisitions and technologies helps CA offer a broader set of tools to manage and optimize cloud computing.

Oblicore

CA's first cloud acquisition of 2010 was Oblicore, an Israel-based developer of service level management software.

Oblicore was founded in 2000 and makes software used to improve access to applications running on remote services, a critical tool for businesses as they embrace the cloud and rely more heavily on IT resources that are outside of their own data centers.

The January acquisition of Oblicore, the financial terms of which were not revealed, strengthens CA's ability to set, measure and optimize service levels to meet expectations across enterprise and cloud environments, CA said at the time, adding that Oblicore can extend CA's ability in cloud vendor management and assurance of cloud service quality.

And Oblicore already had a leg up, at the time of the acquisition Oblicore's software already worked with a number of CA solutions, including CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager, CA Service Desk Manager, CA Wily Introscope, CA eHealth and CA Clarity PPM.

Cassatt

The acquisition that started CA's snowballing spending in cloud computing was Cassatt. CA bought Cassatt, maker of cloud computing software that CA claimed makes data centers more efficient, in June 2009.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

CA said the Cassatt buy, which includes Cassatt's software assets and engineering team, would help CA expand its data center automation and cloud computing offerings. The deal also gives CA several patents, patent applications and other intellectual property.

San Jose, Calif.-based Cassatt offers tools that help businesses leverage cloud computing to operate data centers like "compute utilities." Its technology includes a software architecture and algorithms for analyzing and optimizing data center performance to help IT managers better monitor their IT systems and improve them to support business goals.