CA buys Wily for $375M in cash

IDG News Service - Computer Associates International Inc. has agreed to buy application management software vendor Wily Technology Inc. for $375 million in cash, the companies announced today.

Wily's software monitors the performance of applications and lets IT managers diagnose bottlenecks and other problems. CA said the acquisition will extend its own lineup of management software, which is focused mainly on managing computer hardware and user identities.

While CA has tended to approach systems management from a data center viewpoint, Wily has adopted a developer and application management perspective, according to Mark Barrenechea, CA's executive vice president of technology strategy and chief technology architect. "We looked into the market over the past year," he said in an interview. "Wily stood out as a very clear market leader."

With Wily as part of CA, the company hopes to provide an application management platform to manage all kinds of applications, from packaged software, such as Microsoft Corp.'s Exchange groupware and SAP AG's enterprise applications, to custom applications built around Sun Microsystems Inc.'s J2EE, Barrenechea said.

Picking up Wily gives CA solid technology and an experienced sales team covering an area CA has struggled with, said IDC analyst Stephen Elliot. The application management software area requires expertise CA hasn't had, since it deals more with infrastructure management, he said.

CA CEO John Swainson agreed. CA is one of the "slugs" in the crowded application management market, he said in a conference call with analysts.

"CA has some offerings, but not the depth and breadth required by our customers. So we went out to find the best player in the marketplace," Swainson said.

If the deal passes muster with regulators, Wily will become a division of CA's Enterprise Systems Management (ESM) business unit. Wily's CEO, Dick Williams, will join CA to lead the division. Lewis Cirne, Wily's founder and chief technology officer, will also join CA. Wily is based in Brisbane, Calif.; CA is in Islandia, N.Y.


The companies aren't saying yet how their product sets will be linked up; CA will publish a road map about 30 days after the deal closes. That's expected in about three months pending the regulatory approvals.

"There's a very, very small amount of overlap of all components" from CA and Wily, said Al Nugent, CA senior vice president and general manager of ESM. The overlap is mostly in relation to CA's 2003 acquisition of Adjoin Solutions, a Web services management vendor, he said.

With Wily, CA plans to use the same approach it took when it added Niku to its Business