Bill McCracken, the new CEO of CA, opened CA World on Sunday evening by calling attention to change in IT and particularly to the disruptive influence of the Cloud. Of course, everybody and his country cousin is cloud crazy right now, so there was no big surprise in the focus of the speech. CA has been offering some of its software portfolio on a SaaS basis for quite a while now, so the cloud is no new departure for CA.

What surprised me, and just about everyone in the audience, I suspect, was that about two thirds of the way through his keynote address, McCracken announced in rather a low key manner, that CA was changing its name and would henceforth be known as CA Technologies. It was a surprise.

Personally I think the name change is fine. CA was usually called CA back in the day when it was officially called Computer Associates. It was officially shortened to CA under John Swainson, perhaps with the hope that the name change would be taken as a sign that CA was now a fundamentally different company, not one that held you hostage to license fees for aging software products, but one that would carve out its own direction.

CA and the Cloud

Nobody disputes the fact that data centers will be very cloudy; indeed McCracken pointed out that savvy companies now use quite a few cloud services, mostly SaaS with a little bit of EC2 thrown in, but cloud nonetheless. The trick is to manage these disparate resources in a coherent manner.
In the past few years CA has been acquiring software components to assist in this and it has rapidly been integrating them.

The following acquisitions are worthy of mention:

• Cassatt: cloud architecture, management and automation.
• 3Tera: cloud services and application deployment.
• Oblicore: service level management
• Nimsoft: dynamic resource management

All of these were best-of-breed-level offerings and together they make a powerful combination if you want to manage cloud computing in a coherent manner. It’s clear that CA has been gradually and intelligently growing a cloud portfolio. When you add in CA’s other direct software assets, such as its Wiley products and NetQoS, and its indirect software assets (the rest of its software management portfolio), CA’s look to be unmatched.

So McCracken’s message wasn’t cloud-me-too, it was more cloud-is-what-we-do.

Cloud Commons

I’ll cover the extent of the CA cloud capabilities in another posting. The main point is that the company has clearly thought through the problem of managing cloud computing and has built a software portfolio accordingly. What’s also impressive is that it has proactively taken steps to address the cloud adoption issue.

The problem is this: There are no easy ways to evaluate and compare cloud alternatives. This is not only a problem for IT users that are cloud hungry, it’s a problem for anyone selling cloud-enabling technology. The simple question is how do you assess the value of any offering in an objective way.

CA has teamed with Carnegie Mellon University to create The Cloud Commons. This is a social-network-kinda-web-site that enables vendors to provide information on their cloud capabilities and for them to be assessed in terms of what they provide using an independent metric, which Carnegie Mellon has created. It provides a user rating too, a little like the rating that you find on iTunes for iPhone and iPad apps.

CA has funded this, I suspect, for two reasons:

• It wants its name strongly associated with corporate use of the cloud, and this initiative will do it no harm.
• It wants cloud IT users to care about the cloud issues, particularly the cloud management issues.

I’ve meandered my way through cloudcommons.com and even though it’s just launched and doesn’t yet have the weight of content that it will inevitably acquire, it’s a very useful resource already. Take a look for yourself.