CA acquires Nimsoft for $350 million; Eyes smaller enterprises
CA on Wednesday said it will acquire Nimsoft, which makes availability monitoring software, for $350 million.
The all-cash deal gives CA an entry into what it calls "emerging enterprises," companies with revenue between $300 million to $2 billion. CA is looking to add new customers to its base of large enterprises.
In a statement, CA also said it will use its international presence to expand Nimsoft's footprint abroad.
Nimsoft's flagship product is Unified Monitoring, which keeps tab on performance and availability of business applications. Nimsoft's tools work with Google Apps, RackSpace, Salesforce and Amazon Web Services.
CA of late has made a big play for cloud computing companies with acquisitions of Cassatt, NetQoS, Oblicore and 3Tera.
For Nimsoft, the CA deal was about resources. In a blog post, Nimsoft CEO Gary Read said:
In the last couple of years, as cloud computing has become the architecture of tomorrow, Nimsoft has continued to innovate and now finds itself in an enviable position of pioneering new management platforms to deal with the new methods of delivering IT services. Cloud is driving disruptive change to many areas of IT and will drive disruptive change to IT management. Nimsoft will be helping drive the change, not being dragged along by it.
But, Nimsoft had a challenge to achieving our vision. The market is moving so fast and changing so rapidly, that I was concerned that Nimsoft could not, by itself, keep up. We were already hiring additional sales people and engineers as fast as we could, but there is a natural limit to how rapidly you can scale a business without breaking those things that are important to us, customer satisfaction being the top of the list.
Read said he hesitated when approached by CA, but then figured the deal made sense to grow the business.