CA Gets Serious About the Cloud, Grabs 3Tera

Today, CA announced its plans to acquire 3Tera, an early pioneer of cloud computing, as it continues to broaden its services and solution portfolio and position itself to be a player to be reckoned with in the age of cloud-based computing. 3Tera's AppLogic platform brings cloud computing to service providers and enterprises by offering a grid operating system that allows the user, via a browser, to assemble, deploy, and scale on-demand applications. It is popular with service providers that want to build a public cloud and enterprise customers that want to deploy a private cloud within their data center.

The fact that CA decided to grab 3Tera says a lot about both the direction of CA and the maturation of cloud computing. 3Tera's AppLogic, which is Xen-based at the moment, makes it much easier for customers to move applications to a cloud-based platform. It abstracts applications from the infrastructure and makes deployment much easier.

But, in the hands of CA it becomes something more because of CA's consulting and management expertise. Not to mention, their own customer base. In a snap, CA can have a much more credible conversation with its customers and prospects now that it can point to many successful AppLogic customers. Combined with CA's consultants and sales teams, 3Tera should become all the more popular with enterprise customers looking to get a feel for cloud computing.

“CIOs can use cloud computing to build and manage a new type of IT ‘supply chain’ across today’s virtualized internal and external technology infrastructure,” said Chris O’Malley, executive vice president of CA’s Cloud Products & Solutions Business Line. “3Tera technology is a powerful addition to the total solution CA provides for optimizing these high-value supply chains—from the mainframe to the cloud.”

Finally, the CA acquisition of 3Tera should be seen in the larger context of a fundamental shift underway in IT. The news underlines a significant transition in the way businesses and IT organizations will build and deliver computing services. And the emphasis is on services, rather than stand-alone applications or silos of information, in addition, to the capital and human resources to run and manage the infrastructure. Cloud computing marks a change in that direction. CA's acquisition is likely to be a harbinger of things to come. It's not a bad time at all to be a cloud computing vendor like 3Tera.

You can read the official CA press release here.