CA Beefs Up Unicenter With Niku Buy
The vendor's fourth acquisition in a year is designed to make its flagship Unicenter systems-management framework more useful and valuable to customers.
In making its fourth acquisition in a year, Computer Associates went after a company that offers software that will help to make CA's flagship Unicenter systems-management framework more useful and valuable to customers.
It also may help ease concerns among customers and potential customers that multimillion-dollar investments and multiyear commitments to deploying massive systems-management frameworks from CA and other vendors isn't a smart way to spend limited IT budgets.
As CA struggles to escape from the cloud cast by past financial scandals, Unicenter still generates $1.5 billion annually in sales and maintenance fees. Unicenter is designed to monitor and manage most parts of a company's IT infrastructure, generating alerts when things go wrong and reports on how the computer systems, applications, and networks are performing. But some customers say such systems-management frameworks don't provide good value because they're too expensive and unwieldy.
Niku Corp., which CA said it will buy for $350 million, offers a product called Clarity IT-MG that can take advantage of the information provided by Unicenter to help IT managers better manage their systems. "The great strength of Unicenter is in telling how the network is doing," says Josh Perkins, Niku's president and CEO. "We'll attach business perspective to that data, reveal how IT is doing for the business, and help ensure dollars are spent the right way."
Perkins will become a senior VP in CA's Business Service Optimization unit, where Niku's software will become part of a line of products to help companies make better use of technology to improve business processes. Clarity IT-MG is designed to help companies make better technology-investment decisions, monitor and track the execution and delivery of technology initiatives, and assess the results.
That functionality will fit right into the Business Service Optimization unit, which tries to help CA customers align IT objectives with business objectives, control IT costs, and deliver IT as a service, according to one analyst.
The two companies have had a reseller agreement in place since January and "CA will deepen Clarity integration with its business optimization products," says Melissa Webster, an application life-cycle-management analyst at IDC. "That should lead to better alignment between business and IT."
It also should help companies make better IT-spending decisions. "Companies need to spend less on keeping-the-lights-on maintenance," she says, "and spend more on innovative new apps that grow top- and bottom-line revenue."
Niku already has been working with CA customers, which Perkins describes as businesses that have "8,000 apps with 7,000 vendors." He says his goal is to make IT systems management simpler. "The more intelligence we can extract from Unicenter," he says, "the more we translate the data into useful business views."
In the past year, CA has acquired Pest Patrol, an anti-spyware company, Netegrity, a networking company, and Concord Communications, a network-management company.
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