Eyeing the Cloud, CA Acquires MSP Monitoring and Performance Vendor Nimsoft

CA will acquire IT performance and availability monitoring solution vendor Nimsoft in an all-cash deal worth $350 million.

Redwood City, Calif.-based Nimsoft bills itself as a provider of those monitoring solutions for both emerging enterprises and managed service providers.

CA said the acquisition “significantly expands its ability to meet IT management needs of emerging enterprises and MSPs, both of which are playing leading roles in the growth of cloud computing.” It’s a target audience—with revenues from $300 million to $2 billion—that CA estimates will account for about a quarter of the software spending in CA’s market space by 2013.

Nimsoft has approximately 800 customers, including nearly 300 MSPs. CA said it plans to work closely with Nimsoft’s MSPs and other partners to penetrate emerging markets.

“CA and Nimsoft are a perfect match,” said Gary Read, Nimsoft's president and CEO, in a statement. Read will join CA as senior vice president and general manager of the Nimsoft Business Unit at CA. “We are joining a company that wrote the book on enterprise management. We’re bringing a very strong track record of success in the hosted and managed services segment and with mid-market enterprises.”

Nimsoft’s operations will report under CA’s Cloud Products and Solutions Business Line. CA said the majority of Nimsoft’s 120 employees to remain with CA after the completion of the transaction, which is expected to close by March 31.

CA said the deal will add an entirely new set of customers to its base, which has historically been made up of large enterprises. Plus, CA expects that the combination of Nimsoft’s technology and go-to-market approach will be a win for the combined company in international markets, where cloud computing is growing.

“With our planned acquisition of Nimsoft, CA will be equipped to capture several important growth market segments—including emerging enterprises, emerging national economies and the MSPs who are providing these customers with IT management services via the cloud,” said Chris O’Malley, CA’s executive vice president of the Cloud Products and Solutions Business Line, in a prepared statement. “Penetration of these markets will further expand our global leadership in IT management and complement our existing strength with large enterprise customers.”

Nimsoft offers a Unified Monitoring solution designed to give MSPs complete visibility into performance and availability of customers’ business applications across internal and external IT infrastructures. Nimsoft has also developed monitoring and reporting solutions for public cloud and on-demand offerings such as Google Apps for Business, The Rackspace Cloud, Amazon Web Services and EC2, Salesforce.com, as well as internal applications, databases, and physical and virtual server environments, the companies said in a statement.

CA’s Nimsoft deal follows CA’s recent acquisitions of Cassatt, NetQoS and Oblicore, and the planned acquisition of 3Tera.