* Analysis of CA’s acquisition of Concord Communications
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.
Nevertheless, once you get past the initial blush – which is in my opinion likely to be strongly positive for CA – the roadmap that CA presents will be telling. Are we looking at two virtually separate lines of business that are melded together by services and bi-directional event sharing (a situation which already exists between Spectrum and CA), or are we looking at a daring move to integrate best-of-class technologies creatively?
This last question is especially significant given the draconian but admirable direction CA has taken in pushing towards a consistent data schema across its full portfolio – the so-called “Management Data Base” (MDB). This will herald an era of flexible data sharing across virtually all of CA’s products, with the Unicenter product suite (including network, systems, applications, asset and service management) taking the lead. MDB should bring CA a versatility and flexibility in seeing, for instance, if a given asset is available, relevant to a service, appropriate to a user, configured correctly, and performing optimally – with different role-sensitive options to support help desk, asset management, capacity planning, change management or service-level management, etc.
If that sounds a lot like the industry directions toward a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) for a single standard data resource to support multiple management disciplines, well, that’s not entirely a coincidence, even though CA’s initial motive was architectural rather than process-centric as per the initial CMDB guidelines of the IT Infrastructure Library.
It’s worth noting that Concord is just now planning the integration between its eHealth suite and Aprisma’s Spectrum. This integration in itself presents a complex set of options.
But beyond this, it will be interesting to see how CA leverages Concord’s powerful capabilities for visualization and analysis across networks, systems and applications; Spectrum’s rich auto-discovery and analytics across networked infrastructure; and both companies’ capabilities in business service management.
What will we hear more about – MDB or professional services? The difference will be the choice between a solid tactical acquisition with a strong near-term blush that may eventually fade, and a potentially brilliant and creative attempt to redefine CA as a total solutions provider.
