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CA hit the acquisition trail again April 13 to pick up automated job scheduling provider Cybermation for $75 million.
Although the Islandia, N.Y., company is already a leading supplier of job scheduling automation tools for more batch-oriented jobs, Cybermation complements that with event-driven job scheduling.
“Cybermation is a pioneer in event-driven automation,” said Ray Nissan, CEO of the privately held Cybermation in Toronto, Canada.
As the business world became more real-time and data centers became more customer-facing, the market has demanded both types of automated job scheduling, he added.
Cybermation fits into the workload automation strategy CA outlined late last year at its CA World users conference.
That evolutionary “vision” calls for the unification of separate CA job scheduling tools for the mainframe and distributed worlds, combined under a common graphical interface, according to Will Bauman, senior vice president of workload automation in Islandia.
CA will use the event-driven Cybermation products to help it get to the next stage in the evolution of workload automation.
“The next stage is when [enterprises] operating in an on-demand, transaction processing, real-time environment are scheduling units of work across the enterprise in conformance with a business policy that defines what the service level objectives are, what takes precedence over what, and so on. They can feed into virtualized environments so that they can take advantage of the optimization of servers or storage as well as the workloads that run on those,” said Bauman.
CA is targeting enterprises employing grid computing architectures for its evolving workload automation strategy, he added.
For the privately held Cybermation, which generated revenues of $30 million, the acquisition provides the smaller company with access to CAs deep pockets, a larger installed base of customers and a larger sales force to help it compete more effectively against large competitors such as IBM and BMC Software.
“CAs renewed customer focus is also very important for us. Weve historically had very high levels of [what Cybermation calls] customer enthusiasm. Well help [CA] get to the next level of customer enthusiasm,” said Nissan.
Nissan said he intends to remain with CA after the deal closes, and he expects “a vast majority of Cybermation staff will be staying with the company, including sales,” he said.
Cybermation, which will keep its facility in Toronto, will become a part of CAs workload automation product line under Bauman.
After the deal closes within 15 to 45 days, CA is expected to release a more detailed integration roadmap.