CA is continuing to build on its portfolio of software designed to
help businesses and service providers manage their cloud computing
environments.
CA announced Jan. 11 that it has bought Oblicore, a company whose
software helps users monitor and manage their service level agreements
across their IT infrastructures, a key issue as businesses start
tapping into public and private clouds.
No financial terms of the deal were released.
Oblicore’s flagship Oblicore Guarantee software enables users to
monitor not only the service level agreements but also the
infrastructure’s performance. As companies begin to move some of their
business into cloud environments, it becomes increasingly important to
ensure that SLAs are being met, according to CA officials.
“So far, cloud providers have been pretty careful about sticking
their necks out, barely offering any sort of SLA that you can take to
the bank,” Jay Fry, CA’s vice president of business strategy, said in a
Jan. 11 blog post.
“The result? ‘Best efforts’ by the cloud vendors to keep things
running, but downtime situations similar to what salesforce.com users
faced last week. However, as cloud computing matures, this has to
change. And as it does, being able to track and manage the service
level obligations you have with providers—internal and external—will be
crucial.”
Oblicore has been a longtime CA partner, and its software is
integrated with such CA solutions as Spectrum Infrastructure Manager,
Service Desk Manager, Wily Introscope, eHealth and Clarity PPM.
Analysts Jasmine Noel and Richard Ptak said in a Jan. 11 blog post that adding Oblicore to its portfolio helps CA not only in cloud management but also BSM (business service management).
“If CA can integrate Oblicore’s technology with its Service
Assurance efforts with minimal fuss, then the result should be a very
interesting solution to these Cloud services problems,” Noel and Ptak
wrote. “This should be music to the ears of business managers and
business-oriented IT executives who care little about the specifics of
the Cloud implementation and everything about the delivery of the
services that meet stringent performance requirements to serve fickle,
demanding customers. We see CA as having made a very clever acquisition
with Oblicore; one that puts them a step ahead of their competition.”
Oblicore is the third acquisition in this area in the last seven months. In June, CA bought some of the technology assets of Cassatt, which built software to help businesses manage distributed computing environments, and in September bought NetQoS, which built network performance management solutions.
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