CA acquires 3Tera while building cloud management portfolio ­

CA announced that it had acquired 3Tera yesterday. (see CA adds cloud portfolio buys 3Tera for another view of this event) This is one of a number of recent acquisitions in the virtualization and cloud management technology market. It appears that CA is building and buying a strong portfolio to stake out its claim in the cloud.

Here's what CA has to say about this acquisition

CA, Inc.today announced a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held 3Tera®, Inc., a pioneer in cloud computing. 3Tera’s AppLogic® offers an innovative solution for building cloud services and deploying complex enterprise-class applications to public and private clouds using an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI). Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

With 3Tera—which follows CA’s recent acquisitions of Cassatt, NetQoS and Oblicore—CA continues to aggressively expand its portfolio of solutions to manage cloud computing as part of an integrated information technology management program.

3Tera enables enterprises and service providers to provision, deploy and scale public and private cloud computing environments while maintaining full control, flexibility and reliability. 3Tera also makes it easy for service providers to offer application stacks on demand by adding applications to the AppLogic catalog, where they can be deployed to a low-cost, 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.

Snapshot analysis

3Tera has been the victim, err subject, of posts here on Virtually Speaking from time to time. Recent examples include Certification an age old tactic and 3Tera releases AppLogic 2.4. I've classified them as a supplier of application virtualization and management that competed with companies such as Tibco's DataSynapse, Trigence (now AppZero), Citrix Microsoft and VMware.

I've always thought that the approach 3Tera was taking would be very useful to many organizations trying to make the best use of their physical and virtual servers. As they moved to add cloud computing to their portfolio, their offering appeared even more appealing. It's clear that CA thought so too.

CA has been busy along a number of tracks recently.  They've been strengthing their own management tools and buying up other suppliers.

In the recent past, CA has added Cassatt, NetQoS, Oblicore and now 3Tera to its stable. Cassatt brought powerful automation and orchestration technology. NetQoS for network virtualization and management and Oblicore for service management.

When these are added to CA's portfolio, it is clear that the company wants to be seen as a supplier of management and security software that can reach from the desktop to the datacenter to the cloud. Making this patchwork quilt of technology into an integrated whole is likely to be a bit challenging.

We'll also have to watch how CA manages the process of integrating all of these acquired companies into its world.  This is often where big problems occur regardless of the strength of the technology.  CA has a corporate culture that differs in significant ways from those acquired companies. If we review the history of IT acquisitions we often see that the integration fails and the technology quickly finds its way into the history books.

Why? The acquiring company wasn't able to retain and motivate a few very key managers, developers and the like.

Unasked for shoot-from-the-hip advice

CA it would be wise of you to do your best to keep the best minds in all of these companies.  This includes top management, marketing, sales, development and support.  I've noted that key team members from Cassatt and NetQoS have popped up elsewhere. Making this all work is more than just getting a number of APIs to line up and rewriting some technical manuals.