CA plucks automation assets from struggling Cassatt

CA has acquired for an undisclosed sum the assets of data center automation vendor Cassatt, perhaps salvaging the technological innovation developed earlier this decade at the financially struggling start-up.  

CA says the intellectual property assets and key executives from Cassatt will help further CA's data center automation products with intelligent optimization capabilities. Don Ferguson, CA's chief architect, says Cassatt became an attractive acquisition target because it added a level of "informed analysis and intelligent automation" in its technology that CA could incorporate in its broader monitoring, management and automation products.

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Cassatt's key value is policy-based intelligence that can help IT managers make decisions about resource allocation and data center optimization, Ferguson says. "Cassatt has innovative technology for doing analysis and planning in semi-real time, which means you don't have to go offline and perform extensive capacity planning. It has a policy brain for building the change process and figuring what the change could be online."

Industry watchers say CA could also be planning to put Cassatt technology to work at managing cloud resources. Jasmine Noel, co-founder and principal analyst at Ptak, Noel and Associates, say Cassatt's tools could help CA enable customers to better manage IT services and resources when put to use in cloud computing.

"Because nothing is going to stop the clouds from rolling in -- it's just a matter of whether IT managers are going to get flooded out or can direct the rain to where it's needed. CA has basically picked up some technology for directing the rain," Noel says. "More importantly the [Cassatt] technical team has been working at the cloud management problem for some time now. CA can use that experience particularly in building out pre-packaged workflows for their solutions, so that their customers can benefit from those lessons learned."

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