News

CA Extends Cloud Push with Layer 7 Acquisition

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• May 3, 2013

At last week's CA World conference in Las Vegas, the company made clear it's not stepping back from expanding its cloud focus on a number of levels. That's no surprise considering the company tapped former Taleo chief Michael Gregoire as its new CEO late last year. Taleo, was a software as a service based provider sold to Oracle for $1.9 billion.

Adding to its cloud focus, the company also announced at the conference that it has acquired Layer 7, whose secure API offering will bolster its identity and access management suite, which includes SiteMinder, with the aim of providing added cloud security services. CA said it would also tie Layer 7 into its DevOps offerings, notably the LISA suite.

"It can be argued that CA Technologies has long been committed to mobile computing and SaaS, but with the arrival of Mike Gregoire, commitment to these strategic initiatives is more overt, wrote Joe and Jane Clabby of Clabby analytics, in a research note. "As for Big Data analytics and DevOps, we had not heard any formal commit-ment from CA Technologies before on these strategic growth areas, so we consider them new initiatives."

While CA has emphasized infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and SaaS for several years, Gregoire plans to make the latter the clear focus going forward, according to the Clabby report. "Gregoire indicated that he planned to talk to CA Technologies customers over the next year about potential new ways to restructure enterprise licensing so businesses can constantly run the newest versions of CA Technologies software." That would presumably mean transforming to more of a SaaS-based model.