CA’s all cash $350 buy of Nimsoft, known for its performance software, gives CA access to smaller clients where Nimsoft has built its customer base.   This acquisition contrasts with CA’s acquisition of Oblicore and 3tera in early 2010 and NetQoS and Cassatt in 2009, which focused on the larger enterprise clients with cloud management requirements.   451 Group analysts note that Nimsoft has 800 midmarket clients which use its managed service provider (MSP) product to provide cloud software management.   451 Group went on to say that CA claims that it has 14,000 potential clients that can utilize its products.   “With our planned acquisition of Nimsoft, CA will be equipped to capture several important growth market segments — including emerging enterprises, emerging national economies, and the MSPs who are providing these customers with IT management services via the cloud,” Chris O’Malley, a CA executive vice president, has written in a statement. “Penetration of these markets will further expand our global leadership in IT management and complement our existing strength with large enterprise customers.”

After a major cloud computing partnership with Microsoft with in December, NetApp has now announced a comprehensive set of management tools to enable service providers to build private and public clouds for both storage and virtualization customers.   The latest products from NetApp not only enhance functionality in providing services and apps for enterprise clients, it bolsters functionality and security for IT service provider cloud deployments for their customers.  "NetApp has a proven track record of successfully teaming with leading service providers to power their cloud service offerings," Patrick Rogers, NetApp's (NASDAQ: NTAP) vice president of solutions and alliances, wrote in a statement. "Our strategy in this space is to enable the success of our solution partners, not compete with them, and through them provide a broad and open set of industry cloud services for enterprise IT customers."