CA is expanding its cloud computing capabilities by acquiring assets from struggling Cassatt, a six-year-old company started by former BEA CEO Bill Coleman that was an early pioneer in what would become cloud computing, but which had fallen on hard times in recent years. The Cassatt deal will add to CAs Lean IT initiative and give it more expertise in data center infrastructure management and automation.CA is expanding its cloud computing capabilities by buying assets from troubled Cassatt,
a company started by high-profile Silicon Valley executive Bill Coleman
about six years ago to build software to help enterprises manage
distributed computing environments.
Terms of the deal, announced June 2, were not disclosed.
Ajei Gopal, executive vice president of CAs Products and Technology
Group, said the addition of Cassatts technologiesas well as several
executives, engineers, developers and patentswill add to the companys
portfolio of data center management software and its Lean IT
initiative. Lean IT is designed to help businesses lower their IT costs
and improve efficiencies by increasing data center automation and
optimization capabilities.
With the addition of Cassatts engineering team and advanced data
center automation assets, CA will accelerate its development of
software that helps customers make more intelligent, business
policy-based decisions, Gopal said in a statement.
Colemans vision was a precursor of the current trends in cloud computing and data center convergence, which are becoming key areas of competition for such top-tier companies as IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, Novell and VMware.
Oracle also could become a major player in this area if its proposed
$7.4 billion acquisition of Sun goes through. That deal is expected to
close this summer.
Meanwhile, many of those players, as well as companies such as
Amazon.com and Google, are pushing cloud computingboth public and
internal environmentsas a way of helping businesses reduce data center
capital and operating costs while increasing flexibility and agility.
A key part of these trends is management software initiatives from
various vendorsincluding CA and Cassattto handle the rising
complexity created by such computing environments.
Coleman, a former Sun executive and founder of BEA Systems, was able
to attract some top-line talent to Cassatt, including such people as
Richard Green, another longtime Sun executive who has reached the level
of vice president of Sun developer platforms and Java software when he
joined Cassatt in 2004.
However, Cassatt apparently ran through more than $100 million over
those six years and Coleman, Cassatts CEO, said in an interview with
Forbes.com in April that while some companies showed interest in the
companys Cassatt Active Response software, few had actually followed
through on buying it.
In that interview, Coleman said Cassatt had reached a point where it
had to be sold or would go into bankruptcy. He said he had been looking
for a buyer for several months and that there had been interest, though
he declined to say from which companies. Reports had mentioned Google
and Amazon.com as having early interest, though that interest
eventually waned.
Now Cassatt is part of CA. Rob Gingell, Cassatts executive vice
president of product development and CTO, and Steve Oberlin, a
co-founder of Cassatt and chief scientist, both will join CA.
In a statement, Coleman applauded the deal with CA.
Cassatt has long been a champion for using a cloud-style
architecture to manage data centers like a compute utility, Coleman
said. This is a great move for both organizations because of the
vision we sharedelivering a new, dramatically more efficient way to
run data centers.
CA Chief Architect Donald Ferguson said the combination of Cassatts
analysis and optimization technologies with CAs automation
capabilities with give CA a more comprehensive infrastructure
management offering.