In the last few years, IT organizations that I have been working with are looking for integrated solutions around business service management, performance management and infrastructure management that allow them to quickly understand service quality and how the supporting IT is contributing to that quality.

The acquisition of NetQoS by CA does make a lot of sense. It allows CA to fill in a gap in the areas where they can understand how IT is performing. But does it get them to that complete solution? I’m not so sure.

The problem they have is that their successful Wily business unit is that - separate. This means that they have a fragmented solution, an application focused solution in Wily and a more infrastructure and network oriented solution in the Spectrum / NetQoS assets. Is this what customers are looking to buy?

This is of course not to take away from the success that CA have experienced with their Intrascope product. They quickly became a market segment leader when this technology was new and technically savvy buyers needed something - and few other vendors had a solution. But now what they have is not really differentiated a great deal. There are other solutions in the market place that can offer similar functionality and at a lower cost.

This means to continue their leadership position, CA need to adapt and change their strategy. The separate business unit made sense at the time, but my view is that they will start seeing erosion in their market share (if they are not already) as other vendors can provide solutions that are either cheaper as a point product technology buy, or a more strategic offering that focuses on the service rather than one part of the technology.

The NetQoS acquisition should be the catalyst to combine the Wily business unit with the Spectrum and NetQoS technologies.