With an eye over its shoulder to see what rivals HP and IBM are doing, CA is making a cloud play in concert with Amazon EC2.

Both are hunting large enterprise accounts because - in the words of Willie Sutton - "that's where the money is."

They are telling them to manage the cloud as a critical component of their IT architectures - "a simple extension of their enterprise IT infrastructure," as Amazon puts it - which then spells the need for comprehensive management capabilities between existing internal infrastructure and the cloud.

So CA's business-driven automation, service management, application performance management and database management solutions now support the Amazon cloud.

CA and Amazon intend to co-market the integrated widgetry to joint customers, according to Stephen Elliot, the vice-president of strategy for CA's Infrastructure Management and Automation business unit.

He said CA means to banish those two showstoppers, security and performance concerns, that prevent companies from adopting the cloud.

CA's software will let users know if the cloud's performing, how it's performing and, if it's not, generate trouble tickets.

CA also plans to extend several of its systems management solutions to EC2.

Figure updates to CA's eHealth Performance Manager, Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and NSM will let users remotely monitor the health and performance of Amazon Web Services resources as an integrated extension of existing in-house IT infrastructure.

"Extending our management solutions to include Amazon EC2," Elliot said, "helps customers achieve Lean IT by delivering unprecedented agility and efficiency between existing internal infrastructure and Amazon EC2."

CA's Spectrum Automation Manager lets users respond to fluctuations in resource demand through automatic provisioning and configuration of Amazon EC2 resources.

Further integration with CA's Service Desk Manager (which includes CA CMDB) governs the change and configuration management process for provisioned Amazon EC2 resources. It tracks change requests to help facilitate compliance with business best practices, ITIL process models and regulatory rules and procedures.

Adding Amazon EC2 infrastructure to the 360-degree view of individual infrastructure components lets Service Desk Manager do impact analyses on planned changes to help avoid business disruptions.

The support of CA's Wily Introscope, a key component of its Wily Application Performance Management solution, will let enterprises maintain visibility into transactions and business processes through internal physical or virtual systems and their external EC2 resources. It should help ensure that applications address business and service level goals by proactively identifying, triaging and resolving performance problems before end users are impacted.

CA Insight DPM is meant to improve the availability and performance of databases running in physical, virtual and/or Amazon EC2 environments. Customers can move their databases to the cloud and continue to proactively manage their performance.

There is no additional fee for CA's support for Amazon EC2. Current pricing maintains.

Spectrum Automation Manager starts at $150,000 and Insight DPM at $2,620. Service Desk Manger is based on the number of concurrent analysts. The list price for 25 is $140,000. CMDB is included in Service Desk Manager. Customers can also license CA CMDB standalone. The starting price is around $110,000. Wily Introscope is a core part of the CA Wily APM solution. Pricing starts at $9,600.