CA's thoughtful acquisition strategy

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 23 November 2011 15:51

IT Industry - Strategy

A CA executive says the company's success in choosing and integrating acquisition targets is the result of thought and planning. Modern software technologies have also played a part.

According to CA Technologies' chief technical officer, executive vice president and distinguished engineer Don Ferguson, the company has put a lot of thought into its strategy and an associated acquisition plan. "Companies don't often do that - acquisitions are often reactive," he observed.

CEO Bill McCracken said any near-term acquisitions by CA are likely to relatively small "tuck in" arrangements, but when Dr Ferguson was asked at the CA World 2011 conference if any key pieces were still missing, he said that while the company was strong in monitoring and automation, more work was needed on the analyse and plan part of the story.

"That part of our architecture is still nascent," he said, suggesting that acquisitions as well as internal development would be needed to fill it out.

He pointed out that an important part of CA's acquisition strategy was to make sure that a candidate's technology could be readily integrated with the company's existing portfolio. CA had rejected some candidates with better business plans because their technology wasn't so compatible.

CA is therefore able to integrate a new acquisition in a matter of months. he said. "It's been a lot faster and easier than it's ever been."

"Modern software technologies have helped," he said, pointing to the widespread use of J2EE and .Net, and of external databases rather than having programs do their own file handling.

Disclosure: the writer travelled to Las Vegas as the guest of CA Technologies.