IT management software firm CA has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Nimsoft in an all-cash transaction valued at $350m, in a move to expand its presence in emerging enterprise and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) markets.
Nimsoft has approximately 800 customers, including nearly 300 MSPs and operates primarily in the US and Europe. It provides unified monitoring offerings for virtualised datacentres, hosted and managed services, cloud platforms and SaaS resources.
With the acquisition, CA expects to add an entirely new set of customers to its base, which has historically focused on larger companies, and also expand its presence in growing international markets, where it expects cloud computing and hosted/managed services to play a central role in business development.
Chris O’Malley, executive vice president for cloud products and solutions business line at CA, said: “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.
“Penetration of these markets will further expand our global leadership in IT management and complement our existing strength with large enterprise customers.”
CA estimates that emerging enterprises, which it categorises as organisations with annual revenues from $300m to $2bn, to account for approximately a quarter of the software spending in CA’s market space by 2013.
The acquisition follows CA’s recent acquisitions of Cassatt, NetQoS and Oblicore. Last month, CA also announced that it would acquire cloud computing infrastructure firm 3Tera, which enables enterprises and service providers to provision, deploy and scale public and private cloud computing environments.
The acquisition is expected to have minimal impact on fiscal year 2010 results and to be dilutive to earnings per share in fiscal year 2011.
