With Nimsoft CA gives cloud a tighter hug

MUMBAI, INDIA: CA Inc.,has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Nimsoft, Inc.-a leading provider of IT performance and availability monitoring solutions for emerging enterprises and Managed Service Providers (MSPs)-in an all-cash transaction valued at $350 million.

A press release tells how the acquisition significantly extends CA's ability to meet the unique IT management needs of emerging enterprises and MSPs, both of which are playing leading roles in the growth of cloud computing. CA estimates that emerging enterprises, which it categorizes as organizations with annual revenues from $300 million to $2 billion, will account for approximately a quarter of the software spending in CA's market space by 2013. By leveraging Nimsoft's market expertise and technology, CA expects to add an entirely new set of customers to its base, which historically has been comprised of large enterprises.

Nimsoft's technology and go-to-market approach also will leverage CA's presence in growing international markets-where the Company expects cloud computing and hosted/managed services to play a central role in business development.

"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. "Penetration of these markets will further expand our global leadership in IT management and complement our existing strength with large enterprise customers."

Nimsoft has developed monitoring and reporting solutions for public cloud and on-demand offerings like Google AppsT for Business, The Rackspace CloudT, Amazon Web ServicesT and EC2, Salesforce.com, as well as internal applications, databases, and physical and virtual server environments.

Today's announcement follows CA's recent acquisitions of Cassatt, NetQoS and Oblicore and the planned acquisition of 3Tera.

"As the way organizations deploy business services continues to shift, the way they manage those services must also shift," said Dennis Callaghan, senior analyst at The 451 Group. "CA's acquisition of Nimsoft-following its other recent acquisitions in the cloud computing space-demonstrates that CA is expanding its capabilities to meet the needs of its existing enterprise customers while also stepping up to address those of the emerging enterprise and MSP sectors."

The acquisition also will extend CA's leadership position in the Service Assurance market segment, offering one of the most comprehensive suites of IT monitoring and management solutions in the industry, says the company. These solutions provide IT organizations with complete insight into application behaviors and infrastructure health, helping them to ensure the reliability of critical business services and optimally utilize available hardware capacity.

"CA and Nimsoft are a perfect match," said Gary Read, Nimsoft president and CEO, who will be joining CA. "We are joining a company that wrote the book on enterprise management. We're bringing a very strong track record of success in the hosted and managed services segment and with mid-market enterprises. CA clearly shares our commitment to address customers' evolving requirements for the management of their IT systems, including their move to virtualization and the cloud."

Nimsoft's operations will report under CA's Cloud Products and Solutions Business Line. It is anticipated that the majority of Nimsoft's approximately 120 employees will remain with CA after the completion of the transaction, which is expected to close by the end of CA's fourth fiscal quarter, ending March 31, 2010.

The acquisition is expected to have minimal impact on fiscal year 2010 results and to be dilutive to earnings per share in fiscal year 2011.