Just in case you needed a reminder that network management is an area still worth real investment, you can take heart from Computer Associates’ move to acquire Concord Communications.

CA is investing $330 million with an assumption of debt of an added $20 million. Concord had itself recently acquired Aprisma Management Technologies for $93 million from Gores Technology Group in January - and Aprisma’s Spectrum, with its advanced root-cause analytics, is one of the most critical jewels for CA.

The investment, although not at all out of line with the value of the portfolio and client base (3,000 Concord customers and 1,000 Aprisma customers, some of whom overlap), is substantial and shows CA’s real commitment to network management. And this is “network management” in the more enlightened sense: going beyond an element-centric view of the world to include broader infrastructure interdependencies and supporting system, application and service performance management.

CA has been struggling to assert itself in network management and has made advances in its traditional Network Performance Option and Advanced Network Operations products, which will be further enhanced with announcements later this year.

CA has also invested in a technology, which it calls “sonar,” derived from the 2003 acquisition of Silent Runner. Sonar, initially a security product integrated with eTrust, does advanced packet sampling and analysis to map anomalous application flows across an infrastructure. It may shore up one of Concord’s weaknesses in performance management, bringing more advanced application flow monitoring. CA will introduce sonar capabilities in the context of advanced network diagnostics to complement current offerings in security and service management.

Before the Concord acquisition, CA’s network management products were approaching respectability on their own, but there were still some gaping holes. Root-cause analytics was and is probably the single biggest area for improvement.

Root-cause analytics aside, there are still plenty of areas of potential overlap between CA’s network management portfolio and that of Concord/Aprisma. CA has invested, for instance, in more advanced auto-discovery, and certainly has made advances in capturing performance issues across a network with reasonably good visualization and nice toggling between past and present performance information. But what CA gets with Concord and Aprisma is a much-enriched portfolio and, above all, credibility and brand recognition as a respected “network management” provider.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.