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.”

Google’s Apps Marketplace opened the online doors for business on Tuesday with 50 companies joining in the offerings.    The most popular offerings were related to Google cloud apps that are Software-as-a-Service focused.   Lesser known companies joined in with CRM, fax and ERP apps, but there were well known companies such as Intuit with its payroll software and content management from Box.net.   Creative offerings from companies such as Manymoon, with its free "social productivity, project management, and task management" app, were part of the mix. Atlassian Software known for its hosted software development suit will bring its customer to Google Apps, but will benefit from the Google Apps that enable word processing, calendar, and chat within the Atlassian suite.

RightNow, known for its Web customer experience management software, believes that the cloud provides a new opportunity for cloud software vendors to provide fair pricing that reflects a new level of economies of scale.   RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte stated  The “Cloud Challenge” is directed at other major players in this space including Oracle, SAP, Salesforce.com, and other vendors.   "We are challenging the industry to finally deliver on the full promise of the cloud. I challenge our peers to step up and engage with clients like true cloud vendors, not on-premise vendors in cloud clothing," stated RightNow's chief marketing officer, Jason Mittelstaedt. 

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."

HP and the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) have identified the top cloud computing security threats in a new document which features research on the subject.   The CSA has provided a warning to organizations to be aware of technology that accumulates sensitive personal information such as credit card numbers, social security numbers and employee information.     Prevention is less expensive that cleaning up after a data loss or regulatory compliance violation, which require notification and system modification.   Chris Whitener, HP's chief security strategist, noted that although cloud computing can reduce capital expenditures, managing risks is often overlooked.  "The No. 1 thing you shouldn't do is approach this with complete ignorance," Whitener stated. "And unfortunately, this is something that a lot of people do. Understand and limit your risk profile. If you approach this with complete abandon, you're asking for it."