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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.