Wednesday, March 10, 2010:
CA, a major player in the cloud computing space, is on an acquisition spree. After acquisitions of Cassatt, NetQoS and Oblicore, CA recently announced the acquisition of 3Tera. "3Tera joins Oblicore, Cassatt and other key acquisitions that complement CA’s SaaS business unit in the company’s cloud products and solutions division. Via this, we would be able to provide customers with innovative solutions for managing, monitoring and optimising internal and external cloud resources. Customers will therefore be able to understand, enable, orchestrate and optimise use of cloud computing to revolutionise the way they run their IT environments," says Amit Chatterjee, managing director (India), CA.
|
|
With 3Tera's impressive customer base including 80 service providers, along with managed service providers and enterprises that use the Internet as the primary customer/user interface, CA pins high hopes on 3Tera. "3Tera’s fundamental differentiation is the ability to assemble IT components required for applications from a catalogue of pre-configured software and virtual server elements. Users are therefore able to deploy newly-configured services to the private or public cloud as single entities. Prior to 3Tera’s arrival, these tasks were performed manually, were error-prone and required systems engineers to move from tool to tool. 3Tera provides a highly-effective solution to execute such tasks in a radically more productive way," explains Chatterjee.
3Tera's clientele includes a $600 million provider of on-demand communications technologies that caters to 90 per cent of the Fortune 500. They use 3Tera as a major service delivery platform and have been able to scale capacity quickly and easily (in one day instead of 45 days) as well as achieve better grid availability/redundancy and faster time-to-market. Similarly, a $30 million provider of on-demand hosting and utility-computing solutions bases a vast majority of services on 3Tera technology. The company’s customers are believed to be able to avoid hefty capital expenditure and save on operating costs while focussing on core business, thanks to 3Tera’s cloud services.
However, with competitors like VMware, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle rounding out their cloud product portfolios with little-fish innovators, will CA really get a competitive edge with their acquisition strategy? "Our development strategy is a combination of build – through our own investment in innovation and product development – and buy, through acquisitions such as those that have recently involved 3Tera, NetQoS and Oblicore. Targeted acquisitions enable us to move quickly and enter new, adjacent markets or substantially upgrade and improve offerings for our customers. A good example is our aggressive move in the management of cloud computing. We have many of the components in-house already, but buying companies such as Cassatt, NetQoS, Oblicore and 3Tera has enabled us to take giant leaps forward. We will continue to acquire companies that bring leading and strategic capabilities to our portfolio," rounds off Chatterjee.
Looking ahead, the cloud services market is expected to grow from $70.8 billion in 2010 to $150.1 billion by 2013 (Gartner report). And CA shall continue to acquire early movers in the cloud technology market, for which the competitive landscape has yet to take shape, to retain its competitive edge.
Vanisha Joseph
|