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CA coughs up $330m in cash for apps dev house

Interactive TKO borged

Software conglomerate CA Technologies has borged another company in its ongoing effort to make its wares relevant in an increasingly virtual and cloudy IT world.

CA, formerly known as Computer Associates, has paid a whopping $330m in cash to acquire Interactive TKO, an application development and lifecycle management tool supplier based in Plano, Texas. Interactive TKO was founded in 1999 by John Michelsen and Ruston Vickiers, application software consultants who create a high-volume load testing platform to see if they could crack a Java-based trading network they were working on for a customer.

The LISA platform created by Interactive TKO simulates all of the layers in a composite application so as you are testing application components under load you don't have to stand up all of the application components on full-scale hardware. The LISA platform does regression testing and helps root out bugs between application components as well as deep within the code.

The system manages continuous validation as all of the components in an application stack – user interface, application servers, service buses, and back-end systems – all go through their normal, iterative development cycles.

The LISA software is used by some of the big names in the software racket, including none other than Oracle; American Airlines is also a big customer, as is Citigroup, DirecTV, Time Warner Cable, and Southern California Edison. The company has 125 customers using its LISA platform, and they are increasingly using it to so "what if" analysis on their multi-tier applications. Such as: What if I move this database from inside my data center to the Amazon cloud? How will that affect my performance?

Interactive TKO is a privately held company, but CA gave a little detail on the acquisition. In the prior twelve months, Interactive TKO had about $39m in sales, double what it raked in during the prior twelve-month period. It has a compound growth rate of more than 100 per cent for both bookings and revenues over the past four years.

CA said that the company was "highly profitable" and that the deal would be slightly dilutive to CA's earnings per share on both a GAAP and non-GAAP basis in its fiscal 2012, but would contribute the bottom line in fiscal 2013. Interactive TKO has 120 employees and all of them, including president and CEO Shridhar Mittal, will be coming over. Mittal will be general manager of the ITKO division when the deal gets done.

Centerpoint Ventures, Hunt Ventures, and Vesbridge Partners kicked in $12.6m in funding for Interactive TKO in 2006 and 2007, and they must be ridiculously pleased with this payout.

CA has ever-been an acquisitive company, and it has been on a typical tear buying up assets to build up its cloudy portfolio, most recently with Hyperformix in September 2010 for an undisclosed amount.

CA also snapped up cloudy system monitoring tool provider Nimsoft in March 2010 for $350m, platform cloud provider 3Tera in February 2010 for an undisclosed amount, and network monitoring software maker NetQoS in September 2009 for $200m. ®

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