eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
CA Technologies acquired Australian telecomm consultancy Torokina Networks to strengthen IT services it provides to telecommunications companies, CA Technologies said on Jan. 25.
The deal actually closed on Dec. 22 but the companies decided to delay the announcement until key customers had been briefed and the sales teams trained, Steve Guthrie, director of product strategy in CA’s Service Assurance business unit, told eWEEK. Financial details were not disclosed.
Torokina has experience delivering “state-of-the-art service assurance management solutions” to communication service providers, CA said. CA plans to expand its support of CSPs, particularly those offering 3G and 4G wireless services, Guthrie said.
The combined service assurance tools, based on the CA Infrastructure Management portfolio and Torokina’s core expertise, are available “starting today,” Guthrie said.
The acquisition builds on CA Technologies service assurance services to strengthen its application performance management, infrastructure management, and service operations management capabilities, Guthrie said. CA already has a strong relationship providing these services to telecommunications companies, internet service providers, broadband companies, and mobile carriers, he said.
We “look for new areas where we can extend our services portfolio,” Guthrie said.
The services offered by Torokina were technologies that carriers were “investing in,” and as more mobile carriers roll out 3G and 4G infrastructure, the market is expected to grow, Guthrie said. The rush to smartphones has been “dramatic,” both in the United States and worldwide, he said. CA is “very optimistic” that the market will continue to grow and bring “tremendous opportunities” as the technology matures and smartphone capabilities continue to expand rapidly.
“People will beat a path” to carriers, Guthrie predicted. CA wants to “leverage our credibility” with the service providers and capture “as much of the market as we can,” he said.
Torokina will allow CA to better monitor service provider networks at, Guthrie said. These companies generally have an IT team supporting the internal network and the employees that rely on it, as well as an operations team which supports the external infrastructure that are offered to customers, he said. CA will provide a single set of tools and applications that can manage both customer-facing service networks and internal IT operations to help CSPs reduce code and improve efficiency, Guthrie said.
The two companies have worked together on various projects in the past and Torokina is a CA channel partner, supporting CA’s eHealth and Spectrum systems. Torokina also supports Oblicore products, which was acquired by CA a year ago.
“Combining the technology and expertise from Torokina with our existing service assurance solutions, CA Technologies can now offer one-stop shopping for CSPs to help them ensure optimized services and network availability to customers and internal users,” said Christopher Cook, a service assurance general manager for CA Technologies.
Torokina’s 11 employees have already been moved into CA’s North Ryde offices right outside Sydney, Guthrie said. Chris Gibbs, the senior vice-president of worldwide sales at Torokina has joined the solution sales business unit at CA as a vice-president, according to Guthrie. The CTO John Ahern and his development team joined the developers group that support the Service Assurance group; while the Torokina support teams joined Service Assurance support, he said. The company’s founder, executive director and CFO, Kevin Vardy, retired from the company in December.