CA Acquisition Moves It Into Growing Government IT Arena

Government IT is a new focus for CA Technologies as it acquires Base Technologies, a consulting firm that manages government assets. Base CEO Rob Davies said CA will "help government customers gain more value from IT investments." CA has already moved to snap up RSA SecurID customers with a trade for CA ArcotID secure-software credentials.

In the latest in a string of high-tech acquisitions this year, CA Technologies has snapped up a privately held consulting firm that manages government IT Relevant Products/Services assets. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Base Technologies has consulting practices in some of the hottest sectors in IT today, including virtualization Relevant Products/Services management Relevant Products/Services, mainframe technology Relevant Products/Services, security Relevant Products/Services and managed Relevant Products/Services IT infrastructure Relevant Products/Services. CA hopes to leverage these assets to drill deeper into a growing market.

According to Input's Federal IT Services Industry Outlook, the market for software and IT services is $86 billion and growing. The Base expertise will round out the technical capabilities of CA Services and allow it to go after more of that business Relevant Products/Services.

"CA is building its consulting competency in a very specific area which is likely to see a fair amount of activity over the next couple of years because of the climate in Washington today," said Al Hilwa, a program director at IDC.

Government Opportunities

Adam Elster, general manager of CA Services for CA Technologies, said the acquisition expands the company's advisory capabilities to public-sector customers across computing environments and platforms.

He said CA Services will leverage Base to "help government customers identify the most efficient use of their investments, manage their large-scale programs more effectively, and determine the best use of virtualization and cloud Relevant Products/Services computing."

Base brings 23 years of experience in the U.S. public sector to the CA table. The company has a strong track record of success with public-sector clients, including the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, the National Institutes of Health, the Federal Aviation Administration, and Commuter Connections, among others.

"The requirements of our U.S. public-sector customers and system-integrator partners are increasingly complex across all IT environments," said Rob Davies, Base's CEO. He sees the merger equipping CA to help government customers gain more value from IT investments as they work toward business agility, cost savings, and risk reduction in a cloud-connected enterprise.

Base is CA's second acquisition this year. The company acquired privately held Torokina Networks in January. Torokina delivers service-assurance management solutions to 3G, 4G and Long Term Evolution (LTE) communications Relevant Products/Services service providers (CSPs). Torokina and CA Technologies had previously worked with CSPs to address market requirements.

CA is clearly ramping up to compete. Just days ago, the company offered all RSA SecurID customers an opportunity to trade their RSA tokens for CA ArcotID secure Relevant Products/Services-software credentials in a one-for-one swap. For each RSA SecurID token, CA offered to provide a three-year enterprise license for the CA ArcotID software credential, including the CA Arcot WebFort authentication server Relevant Products/Services. The only cost to customers making the switch is maintenance.

"Hardware tokens are a security mechanism whose time has expired," said Ram Varadarajan, general manager for CA Arcot Security Solutions of CA Technologies. "The inconvenience of carrying an additional key fob or device Relevant Products/Services for today's increasingly mobile workforce is not practical, and the difficulty of remediation in case of a hardware-token breach can be overwhelming."