3Tera Session at Cloud Expo

CA and 3Tera have announced CA's acquisition of the innovative cloud computing Infrastructure as a Service vendor. This is a great thing for Computer Associates, and perhaps a bit sad for the cloud community in general. Why? It is hard to fit the energy and enthusiasm felt when walking into 3Tera's Aliso Veijo office into words. A tight group of committed entrepreneurs and innovators, with a bit of cockiness due to the unique stature they held in the cloud computing community.

Not that Computer Associates is a bad company. In fact, they have always been one of the best kept secrets in business and enterprise software. Rock solid systems, professional sales and engineering – just not as well known to the broader community as other large enterprise systems vendors.

AppLogic brought the cloud community many firsts. The first to integrate IPv6 into their provisioning system. The first to really simplify the drag and drop provisioning process. Perhaps the first to really test and prove the concept of globally distributed processing and disaster recovery models. And they are really great guys.

Bert, Peter, Sean, and the rest of 3Tera's public face spent a tremendous amount of time supporting the community through participation in training events, community organizations such as the Convergence Technology Council of California, the Any2 Exchange Community – all with not only good community spirit, but also providing strong thought leadership to motivate the community into learning more about cloud computing and the future of information technology.

We will deeply miss 3Tera, and hope the team will eventually regroup with a new set of ideas, and lead us into another generation of technology that will further enhance the industry's ability to deliver a true, global, massively distributed cloud computing reality.

Computer Associates will bring value to the cloud community as well. With the power of CA's organization behind recent acquisitions such as 3Tera, Oblicore, NetQoS, Orchestria, Platinum Technology, Netreon, and others related to process, database and large data set management, the stage is set for increased competition in the cloud service industry. CA has the ability to provide a broad understanding of all aspects of enterprise and Internet-facing tools equal or better than IBM, Microsoft, or any other full-service integrator.

We will look forward to seeing the product of 3Tera integration into the CA family, and hope the innovation and enthusiasm 3Tera's team brought to the cloud community is not swallowed up into a large company bureaucracy.