Published: September 28 2010, 08:49 AM | no comments
by Andi Mann

You might have seen by now our announcement that we have signed a definitive agreement to buy Hyperformix, a leading provider of capacity management software for dynamic physical, virtual, and cloud IT infrastructures. This is really going to help our customers use existing IT resources more efficiently, expand virtualization and related ROI, provide higher availability, and improve service levels, in a number of very specific ways.

First, it directly supports the many organizations that have been asking us for sophisticated capacity management to support their virtualization strategy (and, increasingly, their cloud strategy), beyond what we do already with performance and reporting. Hyperformix will deliver this by complementing and extending our existing solutions - including CA Virtual, CA Service Automation, CA Service Assurance, CA Cloud, and the Nimsoft Monitoring Solution- with more robust capacity management.

It also will allow us to help our customers earlier in their virtualization lifecycle. A majority of enterprises are still in the initial stages of virtualization - with an average of around 25-30% virtual. At these preliminary stages, fundamental disciplines like capacity management are critically important. While we have been able to provide some capacity planning capabilities, particularly with our Service Assurance solutions, Hyperformix will give our customers sophisticated real-time and predictive capacity management capabilities. This will help our customers to extend their virtualization by leaps and bounds, especially if they are still in the early- to mid-stages of their deployments.  

The acquisition also directly solves some of the biggest problems our more mature customers are facing today in their virtualization deployments - things like the VM sprawl that is exhausting available capacity and dramatically reducing virtualization ROI; and the VM stall caused by low capacity awareness and risk-averse business owners that slows or stops rollouts and stalls the major benefits of virtualization. By providing visibility and control over capacity utilization and requirements - now and into the future - our customers will be able to see what VMs are in use, what they can shut down, and what capacity they need to overcome VM sprawl. By being able to ensure high performance and SLA achievement within existing capacity limitations - without poring for hours over performance trending reports - they can direct their scarce skills and resources toward virtualizing more and more workloads, to beat VM stall.

Moreover, the deal continues to grow the ever-increasing gap between CA Technologies and our competitors for managing virtual environments. With Hyperformix we will be able to deliver market-leading capabilities ...

• not only for capacity monitoring, reporting, and planning; but also for real-time and continuous capacity management;
• not only focused on allocating infrastructure (server) resources; but also on optimizing application and service delivery;
• not only for a limited set of physical systems; but also for heterogeneous physical, virtual, and cloud resources; and
• not only for a handful of major platforms like VMware vSphere; but also for Microsoft Hyper-V, Xen, Cisco UCS, Rackspace, and Amazon EC2.

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the R&D budgets of large management vendors, and how that relates (or not) to innovation. Sure, R&D is a big part of organic innovation, but innovation is not always about writing new software. Sometimes it is about combining assets in new ways, or building out a unique portfolio to achieve new strategic objectives. At CA Technologies, we are innovating in all of these ways:

Building a new set of solutions, designed from the ground up for virtualization (e.g. CA Virtual Automation, CA Virtual Configuration, CA Virtual Assurance);

• Expanding existing solutions by incorporating additional CA Technologies products (e.g. CA ARCserve, CA Virtual Privilege Manager, CA Virtual Assurance for Infrastructure Managers); and
• Adding strategic new components and technologies to our solution set through inorganic acquisitions (e.g. 3tera, 4Base, and now Hyperformix).

I am excited to see how all of these approaches are coming together to drive innovation for CA Technologies and our customers. Just like with 3tera, 4Base, and several other recent acquisitions, Hyperformix continues to build out our innovative portfolio; it continues to deliver on our strategy for managing virtual environments; and it continues to achieve our vision to be a clear market leader in managing heterogeneous physical, virtual, cloud, and hybrid IT environments.

So please take the time to check out the Hyperformix Web site to learn more about their solutions, and find out how they will fit with your requirements and strategies. If you are already a CA Technologies customer, you will learn how Hyperformix can leverage existing investments; if you are not yet a CA Technologies customer, you will see even more compelling reasons to make the switch.