CA to acquire unified monitoring solutions vendor Nimsoft 10 March, 2010 By Mark Cox

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"This is a very important transaction to CA," said Bill McCracken, CA's CEO. He said it fulfilled three key strategic goals, expanding market reach into the emerging enterprises and MSPs, creating the industry's most comprehensive suite of IT management solutions, and furthering CA's cloud strategy in both public and private cloud environments.

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.

"We want to reach new customers, which we haven't been able to do well at CA," McCracken said. "Nimsoft has been enormously successful in the markets they were going after."

"CA's strength has been in high end customers, but there's very much a stratification, with customers in the emerging enterprise trending to Nimsoft, and higher end customers trending to CA," said Chris O'Malley, executive VP of CA's newly-formed Cloud Products & Solutions Business Line. "CA also has not been very successful with MSPs and Nimsoft has been extremely successful there."

The Nimsoft Unified Monitoring solution is designed to allow MSPs complete visibility into the performance and availability of their customers' business applications across both internal and external IT infrastructures. Its' broad capabilities and easy deployment and automated maintenance make it an optimal solution for MSPs. Its automated implementation can help accelerate time-to-value and its advanced features are specifically designed to streamline monitoring of a wide range of business applications for multiple customers--advantages that MSPs around the world are leveraging to improve service, expand offerings, and boost margins.

CA will maintain Nimsoft as a standalone business unit. Gary Read, Nimsoft president and CEO, will join CA as senior VP and GM of CA's Nimsoft business unit, reporting to O Malley. CA said they hope 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. McCracken also said that they planned to use and learn from the Nimsoft culture -- to protect and nurture it.

"CA and Nimsoft are a perfect match," Read said. "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."

"The challenge we faced is that the market is moving so fast and rapidly that we were concerned that Nimsoft by itself could not keep up, Read said. "The strategies and visions of the two companies are very much aligned. The combination of Nimsoft and CA will redefine IT management for many years to come."

Nimsoft was originally established as Nimbus Software in 1998 and renamed Nimsoft in 2004. It has approximately 800 customers, including nearly 300 MSPs and operates primarily in the United States and Europe. CA said that it intends to work closely with Nimsoft's robust network of MSPs, hosting providers, outsourcing providers and partners to penetrate emerging markets.

"We will be expanding our distribution channel," said Nancy Cooper, executive VP and CFO at CA. "We acquire a channel when we acquire Nimsoft, so we will be building out that channel."