CA Session at Cloud Expo

OK; I’m not skipping or anything, but I am happy. CA Inc., obviously on the path to acquire more and more cloud technology providers in order to build up its own capabilities for cloud computing, is joining the ever-louder chorus of those in our industry recognizing that enterprises want, no, they demand, better monitoring of cloud providers.

CA this week announced it has agreed to buy a company called Nimsoft, Inc., a Redwood City, CA-based provider of IT performance and availability monitoring solutions for small and mid-sized companies and managed service providers (MSPs). It’s supposedly all for cash, a transaction valued at $350 million.

This latest announcement follows CA’s recent acquisitions of Cassatt, NetQoS and Oblicore, as well as the planned acquisition of 3Tera.

What does this mean for CA? Chiefly that it will greatly extend CA’s ability to meet the IT management needs of emerging enterprises and MSPs. These companies are lead players in cloud computing, and the move will give CA an entirely new set of customers (Its base is historically mostly large enterprises.), and those companies will make up about 25% of software spending in CA’s market space by 2013.

It’s also important for CA’s growth globally. “With our planned acquisition of Nimsoft, CA will be equipped to capture several important growth market segments–including emerging enterprises, emerging national economies, and the MSPs who are providing these customers with IT management services via the cloud,” said Chris O’Malley, CA’s executive vice president, Cloud Products and Solutions Business Line, in a press release. “Penetration of these markets will further expand our global leadership in IT management and complement our existing strength with large enterprise customers.”

Alright; so this is great for CA (and Nimsoft), but what I’m most excited about is the huge recognition (well, $350 million worth of recognition) by a company like CA about the importance of cloud monitoring solutions.

Some of the most important aspects of monitoring services include:

• the ability to monitor both internal and external servers
• 24/7 global monitoring – and frequently (e.g. 1 minute intervals)
• no maintenance and low costs (pay-as-you-use) for customers
• timely reporting of problems, such as downtime, via multiple tools (e.g., email, SMS, instant messenger, RSS)
• SLA monitoring

I could go on with an exhaustive list. But the point I’m making here is hooray that at least the concept of monitoring is becoming more important to huge IT companies, and I predict that demand will keep growing.