CA Buys Cybermation to Bolster System Management Software

Software powerhouse CA, formerly known as Computer Associates but joining the ranks of silly companies that think an abbreviation is a proper name for a corporation, announced last week that it had acquired cross-platform job scheduling specialist Cybermation for $75 million in cash.

While CA has divested itself from a lot of its OS/400-related products (including the PRMS and Interbiz suites, which were sold off to SSA Global), it still has the Synon 4GL development language, now called AllFusion and now, by virtue of the Cybermation acquisition, CA has a tool that can hook into OS/400 and i5/OS servers and automate job scheduling on the platform.

Cybermation, which is located in Toronto, Ontario, was founded in 1982 and established itself as a maker of job scheduling software for mainframes. In 2001, the company launched a cross-platform product called ESP Espresso, which included agents that ran on OS/400, OS/390, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Tru64, Linux, OpenVMS, and Windows servers, and included special agents for ERP applications from Oracle, PeopleSoft (now part of Oracle), and SAP. The software is now called Cybermation ESP, which is split into the mSeries for mainframes and the dSeries for distributed systems, including Windows, Unix, Linux, and OS/400 servers.

CA said in a statement that Cybermation had sales of $30 million in 2005, and was a profitable firm. The company has sales offices in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany, and was trying to get itself in position to better chase a job scheduling software market that is expected to grow to about $1.77 billion by 2010, according to IDC; in 2004, the last year that market data is available for, CA had a 20.2 percent share of the job scheduling software market.

“Cybermation has consistently attracted new customers by offering a compelling workload automation solution with advanced features and benefits,” explained Ray Nissan, Cybermation’s founder and CEO. “Joining CA allows us to integrate our leading job scheduling technologies into CA’s workload automation strategy to deliver a single, highly advanced workload automation platform to the market.”

CA says it will continue to sell the Cybermation tools as standalone products, but will also integrate them into its existing Unicenter Enterprise Job Management tools, which are focused on mainframes as well as distributed platforms, too.