CA's Wily For Web App Wares

On Jan. 5, CA unveiled plans to buy Wily, a Brisbane, Calif.-based Web application management vendor, for $375 million. In addition, CA this week begins reselling enterprise SAN virtualization products from StoreAge, Irvine, Calif.

The all-cash purchase of Wily will take about three months to close, pending regulatory approval, according to CA, Islandia, N.Y. When it does, CA will have Wily&'s 450 customers and its J2EE-based Web application management products, which make running things like credit card transactions and CRM systems more stable and efficient, said CA President and CEO John Swainson.

“[Wily] will become an increasingly important part of our overall management suite,” said Swainson during a conference call.

As more commerce moves online, CA sees the Web application space as so critical it is willing to wait about three years, longer than usual, to recoup its investment, said CA CFO Jeff Clarke.

Wily CEO Dick Williams, who will oversee the Wily Technology Division at CA as part of the Unicenter product group, said about 90 percent of Wily&'s North American revenue comes from direct sales. Once added to CA&'s portfolio, the Wily technology will be sold via CA&'s direct sales force, with fulfillment and professional services opportunities being pushed out to top-level Enterprise Solution Provider (ESP) partners as needed, CA executives said.

Dan Boland, a solution architect at Core Business Technology Solutions, a CA partner in Indianapolis, said the deal should open up new markets for CA and possibly increase the popularity of Unicenter.

Under the StoreAge deal, CA will sell the new products using its direct sales force and ESP partners, said Eric Pitcher, vice president of product management for CA&'s BrightStor line. The deal gives CA block data virtualization tools for mixed-vendor SANs, Pitcher said. A typical 5-Tbyte StoreAge deployment will cost about $60,000, he said.