CA Buys 3Tera – Quick Analysis

Last week, CA announced that it had purchased 3Tera, a cloud management provider. 3Tera was one of the early whacks at what become known as “cloud computing,” building out their offering before the term was widely used. Their basic model of modeling applications and deployments on-top of virtualized pools of resources, or fabrics, or grids depending on your diction, has been used by others who’re seeking to provide the management software needed to run clouds.

Enterprises are apparently driving vendors to provide private cloud offerings, and CA’s purchase of 3Tera feeds right into this market. While CA had purchased the left-overs from Cassatt, clearly more technology – and pre-built customer base – was needed.

It’s also note-worthy that – last I checked – 3Tera was working with service providers who were looking to offer clouds.

(I also discussed the acquisition in this week’s IT Management and Cloud podcast episode.)

Action Plan: CA

What I’d expect to see from CA is more noise when it comes to providing tooling for private clouds to large enterprises. They now have a very real (for how young cloud computing is) cloud stack that has a track records. The challenge for CA – as it would be for any Big 4 vendor – will be related to their cemented-in IT Service Management, BSM, and ITIL acculturated tools into an IT culture that can take full advantage of cloud-driven infrastructure.

Action Plan: Competitors

For other vendors in this space, the question of how seriously to take cloud offerings is further pushed. Just looking at the Big 4:

• BMC has moved its virtualization talk to cloud talk, but they don’t have cloud infrastructure along the lines of 3Tera, per say – they seem to prefer the Cisco Unified Computing roadmap mixed with their usual heterogeneous management strategy.
• IBM, of course, can fit it all into their portfolio, and to hear folks like JPMC and BoA tell it, the offerings are helpful for moving IT along in beneficial ways.
• HP continues to make rumblings, and their OpsWare automation portfolio seems to be moving along in the direction of cloud-themed configuration management, working as the layer that does stuff for folks like NewScale who’ve re-jiggered themselves from RBA to self-service cloud desks. And then there’s that HP/Microsoft partnership which may – or may not – bear some private cloud fruit.

And that’s not to mention the several startups – all the sudden – looking to provide various types of private cloud infrastructure from platform as a service to infrastructure as a service. Clearly, their investors have to be excited about an elder company plucking up a youngster.

Action Plan: IT

This topic of “Agile Infrastructure,” dev/ops, or however you’d like to call the current go at the windmill of IT befuddery is one I’m often going on about, and it’s increasingly seeming like a valiant aspiration to shoot for. The issue for existing vendors and the enterprise IT departments they server is figuring out how to transition without blowing up the legacy infrastructure too much. It’s one thing for hip upstarts who’re starting from scratch to get all cloud crazy, but moving 20 years of acquired IT – usually from different generations of buzz-tech compliance and a trail of acquisitions – to a new thing can be precarious.

Disclosure: IBM, Microsoft, and CA are clients. See the RedMonk client list for others related, including some of those cloud startups.