CA announced recently that it is acquiring 3Tera, a privately
held pioneer in cloud computing, for an undisclosed amount.
3Tera supplies a graphically oriented system for configuring an
application prior to deployment, including deployment as a virtual
machine into the cloud.
"This acquisition addresses more the design of the application
lifecycle. Think of a palette where you can drag and drop the
firewall (to the application), the load balancer, the Web server,"
said Donna Scott, Gartner analyst, on the acquisition.
"AppLogic makes it easy to move existing applications into the
cloud without modifications," says a statement about AppLogic on
the 3Tera Website . 3Tera CEO Barry Lynn added his own comment in a
blog today: "We're taking the next step in moving toward making the
cloud mainstream."
The user can deploy the application to the application server
without configuring the two things to work together. They will be
combined in a virtual environment, ready to be shipped to an
internal, private cloud or to an external public cloud, such as
Rackspace, Joyent or Amazon Web Services EC2.
3Tera is CA's fourth purchase as it attempts to get ahead of a
likely market trend. Vince Re, senior VP in CA's new cloud products
and solutions business unit, says the purchase is part of a plan to
give CA the means to handle application management issues in the
cloud "from top to bottom."
Part of the plan is to make connections from an application
design and configuration engine, such as AppLogic, back to CA's
existing systems management and application performance monitoring
products, Re said.
CA and other parties are still a long ways from achieving such a
goal, says Scott. "It's really early right now. Everyone is just
getting started" in terms of enterprises using the cloud and
systems management vendors managing the applications sent to it,
she said.
CA recently purchased Cassatt, a supplier of software for
repurposing a running server and NetQoS, maker of software for
managing an application and its networking elements. In January, CA
bought Oblicore, a supplier of software for managing application
service levels to an enterprise or to users of software in the
cloud.
Adding 3Tera is CA's attempt "to get ahead of the curve. It is
buying small companies early instead of waiting for a fully
developed (cloud) marketplace," said Scott.
3Tera's AppLogic is currently limited to using the Xen
hypervisor when it builds a virtualized workload from an existing
application but it will add the ability to work with VMware's ESX
Server and Microsoft's Hyper-V as part of the CA product
portfolio.
It will continue to be sold as a standalone product known as
AppLogic, said Jay Fry, VP of cloud products and solutions.
AppLogic as an enterprise product is mostly sold on a subscription
basis of USD 125 a month per server.
The 20 employees of 3Tera will become CA employees. CEO Barry Lynn
will serve as a consultant on the transition of the company with
plans to move on after 3-6 months work for CA, said Re.