ComputerWire believes Cast would potentially make a nice little slot-in acquisition for Compuware or rival Mercury Interactive, which is also increasingly focused on application performance management. Cast and Compuware said they are already actively engaged with several Fortune 1000 companies and are also collaborating on joint marketing and sales initiatives.
Venture capital-funded Cast was founded in Paris, France in 1990 and claims to have made sales of $26m in 2004. It employs 180 staff, and its largest private equity investor – Viventures – is owned by Global Asset Capital and Hamilton Lane. Cast claims 1,800 customers, mostly in Fortune 1000 accounts, and says it enjoys an 80% renewal rate of maintenance and solid repeat business in its existing accounts.
Combined, Compuware said its and Cast’s products offer a comprehensive approach to Quality Management. The Cast Quality Assessment Suite is part of the Cast Application Intelligence Platform, and it automatically extracts application intelligence from source code, and provides easy access for all members of an IT department through dedicated web portals, simulation and mining tools.
Meanwhile in related news, Compuware also announced Strobe 3.2 and iStrobe 2.1, new versions of its application performance management software tools. Strobe 3.2 features the major new enhancement of DB2 DDF support, which helps manage the performance of distributed applications that access mainframe DB2.
Specifically, Strobe 3.2 helps pinpoint which SQL statements are using the most CPU or have delayed response, allowing users to identify where problems are occurring. In addition, Strobe 3.2 helps manage the efficiency, responsiveness and performance of mission-critical z/OS applications by reducing CPU consumption, batch run times and online transaction response times. A web server application for analyzing Compuware Strobe application performance data, Compuware iStrobe 2.1 allows users to measure performance of applications and pinpoint inefficiencies within them, Compuware claimed.
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