CA Acquires Cloud Computing Firm 3Tera

IT management software company CA, announced a definitive agreement to acquire privately held 3Tera, a specialist in cloud computing. 3Tera's AppLogic offers a solution for building cloud services and deploying applications to public and private clouds using an intuitive GUI (graphical user interface). Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. 3Tera offers AppLogic, a cloud computing solution designed to reduce the cost and complexity associated with infrastructure.

With the acquisition of 3Tera, which follows CA's recent acquisitions of Cassatt, NetQoS and Oblicore, the company continues to expand its portfolio of solutions to manage cloud computing as part of an integrated information technology management program. 3Tera helps enable enterprises and service providers to provision, deploy and scale public and private cloud computing environments, as well as help service providers offer application stacks on demand by adding applications to the AppLogic catalog, where they can be deployed to an affordable shared cloud infrastructure. 3Tera's customers include more than 80 enterprises and service providers globally, which use the cloud computing technology to provide services to thousands of users.

"CIOs can use cloud computing to build and manage a new type of IT -supply chain' across today's virtualized internal and external technology infrastructure," said Chris O'Malley, executive vice president of CA's cloud products and solutions business line. "3Tera technology is a powerful addition to the total solution CA provides for optimizing these high-value supply chains-from the mainframe to the cloud."

Using the GUI and drawing from a catalog of preconfigured virtual server and software components, AppLogic is designed to unify application configuration, application deployment and a virtual server fabric. In addition to AppLogic, 3Tera provides a cloud computing marketplace that allows software vendors to provide developers with production-ready cloud components and full applications that are available on a pay-as-you-go basis.

By streamlining cloud-based deployment of composite applications, 3Tera adds new capabilities alongside CA's existing virtual and physical infrastructure management functionality-including that provided by CA Spectrum Automation Manager, the CA Service Assurance line of products, and the recently acquired assets of Cassatt and Oblicore. CA announced plans to integrate AppLogic with these and other technologies to provide customers with a set of tools for delivering, managing and optimizing cloud computing as part of overall enterprise IT environment. CA also plans to extend support of 3Tera, which currently operates on the Xen virtualization platform, to include both VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V.

"AppLogic is a software platform that helps IT departments and service providers rapidly create and deploy cloud applications," said Rachel Chalmers, research director at The 451 Group. "By adding this technology to its own strengths in IT management, CA is offering an intriguing value proposition to customers who want to both take advantage of the cloud's adaptability and maintain rigorous control of the their virtual service delivery infrastructure."