CA World Highlights Powerful MSP and Cloud Service Provider Partnerships

Last week's CA World event in Las Vegas highlighted a number of CA Technologies' partnerships with managed service providers (MSPs) and cloud service providers (CSPs). In attendance were Logicalis, Rackspace and Savvis, who all incorporate CA's solutions in their services platforms.

The event, held by the IT management tools provider, was attended by around 5,000 of the company's partners and customers. CA has been in a period of transition for several years that has included a number of big-name acquisitions as well as management changes.

The biggest change and the one that perhaps resonates most with MSPs was the company's acquisition of Nimsoft in 2010. CA also acquired 3Tera (AppLogic) that year to better aid service providers in setting up their own clouds.

CA has aggressively rolled out service provider licensing for most of its software recently. This includes the ARCserve solution for cloud and on-premises backup and disaster recovery.

And in management news, the company appointed new CEO Mike Gregoire in January. Gregoire is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) expert who was previously CEO of Taleo. Taleo is a cloud-based talent management company acquired by Oracle last year.

CA's next challenge will be to better communicate its strategies and plans to its partner community. In addition to MSPs and CSPs, CA partners with distributors and system integrators. The company offers a number of benefits and opportunities through its CA Partner Program as well. These include online training for certification and accreditation, a Partner Portal designed to improve communications, a partner support infrastructure and sales tools that support all routes to market.