CA Oblicore Acquisition Aimed at Shoring Up Cloud Management
According to conversations I've had with a number of CIOs and other IT executives, managing cloud services is a tough area from enterprises. And the acquisition of Oblicore by CA (CA) is to shore up its important network management business and position itself as a vendor for managing cloud computing.
IT experts have told me that current tools generally don't cut it when it comes to managing cloud computing. The problem is that when you send part of your infrastructure off to be handled in an arms-length way by a vendor, you no longer have the access to monitor activity in the way you might have in the past. Essentially, the enterprise is stringing a number of black boxes together, as you might in an electrical engineering design, where you focus on specs and performance at the interface to know if two parts will work together.
IT departments can't just slap some scopes on the Internet and check impedance, voltage, and signals. However, they need that sort of "let me see if this is doing what I need" metric. That leaves them with the following approach:
- Find out what performance users need and expect.
- Measure what performance degradation you get from the firewall as services pass through it.
- Calculate what performance you now need from the vendor so, by the time it passes through the firewall, users get what will keep them happy.
- Spend much of your time managing the relationship with the vendors so you get the service level from them that you need to make everything else work.