CA builds NimSoft service on Rackspace

CA's IT management as a service effort is being built on Rackspace's infrastructure.

Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier outlined the deal on the company's third quarter earnings conference call. Under the deployment, CA will host its NimSoft IT management application on Rackspace. NimSoft is a software as a service monitoring and reporting application.

The win for Rackspace is notable given CA's girth. CA is a $5 billion enterprise software vendor and may attract others to Rackspace's hosting and cloud services. CA is a direct customer of Rackspace and using the hosting service in the background.

Napier said the company isn't seeing any slowdown from enterprise customers as they migrate toward cloud computing.

In Rackspace's third quarter, the enterprise business continued to grow at a rapid clip. Napier said:

The early adoption that we win from enterprise customers, it tends to be a mission-critical Web app that their IT department is not tailor-made to run. Inside of every enterprise CIO's IT department today, there is a long tail of applications. The IT department itself is tailor-made to run a handful of those applications, the billing system, the ERP system, the manufacturing system, et cetera. The information and the proliferation of apps has happened further outside the IT department down that long tail in the Web app space...The enterprise growth component of it is driven by the adoption of those incremental applications.

Rackspace reported third quarter earnings of $19.98 million, or 14 cents a share, on revenue of $264.6 million, up 32.5 percent from a year ago. Rackspace's total server count was 78,717, up from 74,028 in the second quarter. Rackspace's earnings met expectations and the sales figure topped Wall Street estimates.