CA Technologies, a provider of IT management software, is acquiring Interactive TKO (ITKO), which makes tools for building and testing composite applications, for US$330 million in cash.
The acquisition of ITKO will help CA’s existing suite of performance tools span the application life cycle and focus more on the development side, said Mike Sargent, CA’s senior vice president marketing and operations.
“Management is our heritage,” he said. “As we look at what customers are trying to do [mainly increasing their ability to leverage new innovations and technologies], we see that traditional tools are becoming too costly. ITKO provides an opportunity to de-risk these decisions.”
Sargent added that ITKO’s simulation software, LISA, lets teams make decisions without fully deploying their proposed applications.
“We’re moving toward the management of the future; to the application layer rather than the infrastructure layer,” he said.
Composite applications combine outside services with home-grown applications. According to Sargent, composite applications let companies decrease their time to market and ultimately increase their competitiveness within the market. On the other hand, they may present uncertainty about the reactions of these new services within existing or soon-to-be create applications.
ITKO’s LISA lets software development teams simulate enterprise services and applications without deploying the applications in order to see how that particular application will react to changes in the environment. For example, developers can use to the tool to simulate a credit card transaction on a Web application before deploying all the necessary services and applications, said Sargent. The applications can be deployed in cloud environments, on-premise environments and a hybrid of the two.
Pending regulatory approval, CA Technologies expects to complete the acquisition of ITKO within three months. All 120 employees of ITKO are expected to stay on, with ITKO’s president and CEO, Shridhar Mittal, becoming the general manager of ITKO, which will operate as a division of CA. For the 12-month period ending March 31, ITKO reported revenues of approximately $39 million.
