By Rick Whiting, ChannelWeb, March 11, 2010, 1200 hrs
CA will acquire Nimsoft, a developer of IT performance and system availability monitoring technology, for $350 million in cash, the two companies said.
US-based Nimsoft is the latest of several companies CA has bought to expand its line of network and systems management tools for cloud computing. Within the last nine months CA has acquired Cassatt, NetQoS and Oblicore, and last month announced a deal to acquire private cloud computing platform maker 3Tera for an undisclosed sum.
William McCracken, CEO, CA, said in a conference call that the two companies expect to complete the acquisition by March 31, the end of CA's fourth fiscal quarter and fiscal year.
"It furthers our cloud computing strategy by providing IT monitoring capabilities for both public and private cloud environments," McCracken said, explaining how the acquisition fits into CA's game plan.
The deal also will help CA expand sales to managed service providers and what it calls emerging enterprises—companies with annual sales between $300 million and $2 billion. Those are two markets that McCracken said, "Frankly, we haven't been able to develop well." CA's customer base today is more weighted toward larger businesses.
Nimsoft Unified Monitoring, the company's monitoring and reporting software, works with such cloud-computing systems as Google Apps for Business, The Rackspace Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Amazon EC2, and Salesforce.com, among others.
Privately held Nimsoft will become part of CA's cloud products and solutions business. Gary Read, President and CEO, Nimsoft, will become the Senior Vice President, reporting to Executive Vice President Chris O'Malley who manages that organization.
Nancy Cooper, CFO, CA, said on the conference call that most of Nimsoft's 120 executives and employees are expected to remain with CA. |