Recently I had the opportunity to catch up with Adam Famularo, head of CA’s cloud computing customer solutions group, while he was struggling with mobile phone issues at a cloud computing conference. We reenacted the Verizon “can you hear me now” commercial several times during the conversation. I have to say one thing, Adam is really a pleasant, upbeat spokesman for CA. He didn’t let let lost connections, distorted connections or my sense of humor get in the way of explaining CA’s recent acquisitions and strategy in the cloud computing space. Thanks, Adam, for your persistence!
Although I’m not going to try to run through everything we spoke about, it is clear that the company took a very pragmatic view of its strengths, its history and came up with a entirely reasonable approach to serving its customers needs as they test out and deploy cloud computing to support some of their workloads.
As one would expect of CA, the long time mainframe management software company, the starting place was providing tools to monitor, manage and automate cloud-based tasks by enhancing tools the company already offered.
The next step was a string of focused acquisitions of companies offering tools to help CA’s customers make a gentle transition to cloud computing. This list includes:
- Cassatt - managing, automating and optimizing virtual and cloud-based workloads
- Oblicore - managing service levels
- 3Tera - application framework and virtualization for cloud computing environments
- Nimsoft - performance and availability monitoring “from the data center to the cloud”
All-in-all, CA appears to understand its customers’ needs and is trying to help them deploy virtualized and cloud-based solutions. It was a pretty interesting conversation. Next time, we’ll try to do it without the mobile phone antics. I hope to profile a few of CA’s customers to learn about the benefits they’re getting and what advice they’d offer others.
