CA today agreed to acquire Cybermation, which makes workload automation
software for businesses, for $75 million in cash.
Privately held Cybermation, of Markham, Ontario, posted sales of $30 million
in 2005.
Cybermation’s software and services schedule “jobs,” such as order
fulfillment, maintenance and patch installation, across multiple computers
in a network.
Job-scheduling software is an important piece of IT service management
strategies, said Cybermation CEO Ray Nissan.
It allows computers to handle
and automate processes by communicating with multiple applications and
assigning resources on demand to complete each computing task.
This is important at a time when computers are being reconfigured for
service-oriented architectures (SOA)
computing models, Web services
business processes, said Will Bauman, senior vice president of development
for CA’s workload automation products.
This market of management software is growing: IDC expects the business for
job scheduling software will be worth $1.77 billion in 2010, said IDC
analyst Stephen Elliot.
“Cybermation is a very well-run company and a nice pick-up for CA,” Elliot
said. “CA must rationalize its architecture and product portfolio.
Cybermation has a strong management and engineering team that CA must
retain.”
CA said it will sell the Cybermation solutions as standalone products and
eventually integrate them into its workload automation portfolio.
CA expects to close the deal, its latest in a shopping spree of purchases
under CEO John Swainson, within 30 days.
CA has acquired compliance specialist Niku,
network management player Concord Communications and security software maker Netegrity in the last few years.
Its last major bid was $375 million for application management vendor Wily Technologies in January.
Those are the big buys, indicative of an aggressive company shelling out
billions to improve its competitive position in the management software
market versus IBM, HP and others.