CA, Inc. on Monday announced that it has acquired privately-held Oblicore, a leading provider of Service Level Management (SLM) software for enterprises and service providers.

Oblicore supports and strengthens CA's ability to set, measure and optimize service levels to meet business expectations across enterprise and cloud environments.

Oblicore's solutions also extend CA's capabilities in cloud vendor management and assurance of cloud service quality. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Oblicore's customers include AT&T, ABN AMRO, British Telecom, Cable & Wireless, France Telecom, ING, Lufthansa Systems, Siemens Medical Solutions, and T-Systems. With Oblicore solutions, these organizations are better equipped to design, monitor and manage service level agreements across their IT service portfolio in business terms.

CA, Inc. at SYS-CON's Cloud Expo 2009 East in New York City, announced that CA Advanced Systems Management (CA ASM) is VMware Ready Optimized. Enterprise and cloud computing customers can now use CA ASM−a centrally managed, platform-neutral solution−to discover, monitor, track, and optimize physical and virtual system resources in VMware Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS) environments.

"Oblicore's business-centric approach gives enterprises and service providers better understanding and control over the quality and value of their IT service portfolio," said Ajei Gopal, executive vice president of CA's Products and Technology Group. "With Oblicore and the recent acquisitions of NetQoS and Cassatt, CA is leaping ahead in our ability to help customers optimize IT for better business results and capitalize on the emerging cloud computing opportunity."

As a long-time CA partner, Oblicore has field-proven integrations with CA solutions including CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager, CA Service Desk Manager, CA Wily Introscope, CA eHealth and CA Clarity PPM. Oblicore is designed for open connectivity to virtually any data source, with integrations to business systems and application and infrastructure monitoring tools from Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM, HP, BMC and other providers.

"Our success with mutual CA and Oblicore customers shows that together we can help close the gap between business and IT by establishing and measuring service expectations," said Eric Converse, CEO, Oblicore. "Service Level Management is one of the fastest growing segments in the industry. Delivering Oblicore's solutions through CA's thousands of expert sales, services and support professionals will allow us to bring the benefits of SLM to both CA's vast network of existing customers and a growing global market of new ones."

Extending Business-Centric IT Service Management to the Cloud
Oblicore's top-down methodology for SLM begins with contracts that use business language and metrics. These contracts easily integrate with technical data sources for continuous service performance measurement against contract terms and conditions. The resulting transparency and control allow customers to better manage expectations between IT and the business, as well as contracts with external service providers. The use of service contracts to manage service delivery becomes even more important as enterprises leverage cloud services. Lack of direct management control makes these contracts the primary assurance mechanism. Oblicore will play a significant role in helping enterprises assure the quality of cloud services.

"EMA believes cloud computing trends will further increase the demand for service-based management including service level and service value management. Customers are demanding solutions like Oblicore that can offer business-oriented service management including details related to the service contract, collaboration during the negotiation process, and analytics to represent service delivery results in a dashboard format," said Lisa Erickson-Harris, EMA research director. "Oblicore's strengths are well-suited to bridge the IT/business gap by capitalizing on existing management data, business-driven service definition and analytics to demonstrate service delivery results at each service lifecycle phase."

CIOs can also quantify the overall value of their service portfolio by combining Oblicore's measure of service quality with metrics on service cost, consumption and business objective alignment from CA Service Catalog, CA Service Accounting and CA Clarity PPM.

Oblicore solutions will be available directly from CA and through approved channel partners.