But while the buyout of Sterling will infuse CA with some new technology, analysts say the acquisition is business as usual. "It's pretty much a classic CA acquisition," says Melissa Eisenstat, an analyst with CIBC World Markets. CA has become the world's third-largest software vendor, at least in part, by acquiring other companies, including Platinum Technology International Inc. in 1999.

Sterling's storage-management product line complements CA's, says CA president and chief operating officer Sanjay Kumar. "We'll be the only vendor to put together a complete, end-to-end storage-management solution," Kumar says. CA, for example, provides tape-storage software targeting Windows NT and Unix environments, while Sterling's SAMS tape-storage software runs on OS/390 mainframes.

The Sterling acquisition will make CA more competitive against vendors such as Veritas Corp. in the backup-and-restore market, and position the company for growth in the storage resource management and storage area network arenas, says Colin Rankine, a Giga Information Group analyst. CA already leads other SAN vendors with the capabilities built into its Unicenter TNG systems-management technology, according to Gartner Group analyst Nick Allen.

"We'd prefer the kind of integrated storage-management solution that the merger could bring about," says Debbie Reed, a systems engineer at Motorist Insurance in Columbus, Ohio, which uses Sterling's mainframe SRM software and CA products. But others are less positive. "Our maintenance contract costs typically go up if CA buys a company whose products we use," says David Kannady, lead network analyst at Georgia Blue Cross Blue Shield, which is considering using Sterling software to help manage a planned storage area network. Kannady says Sterling will be a tougher sell now.

Sterling's Cool application development suite and its Eureka business-intelligence portal "will enable a whole new level of E-business for us," Kumar says. For example, he envisions an insurance company using CA's Jasmine object-oriented database as an integration engine to pull information from applications built using Cool. That data can be made available to clients on the Internet via the Eureka portal. CA also plans to use Eureka to build portals for its enterprise-management systems.

CA expects to complete the Sterling buyout by early April, and will detail plans to integrate Sterling's products with its own at its CA World user-group meeting that month as well.