CA Technologies (NYSE: CA) is on a shopping spree this year. The company just announced the acquisition of Hyperformix, a privately held company specializing in management of mixed IT environments that span hardware systems, cloud services, and virtual servers.

The tally for CA's five acquisitions this year add up to more than $670 million, and most of that has gone toward a stronger virtual and cloud presence. The strategy is a great fit for CA's traditional focus on systems management and could transform the company into a major player in the new, heavily virtualized era of enterprise computing.

These moves also make CA an attractive buyout target itself. The stock is reasonably cheap, there's $1 billion more cash than debt on the balance sheet, CA is solidly profitable, and the current $10 billion in enterprise value makes it a comfortable bite size for any of the buyout-hungry giants stalking the IT sector nowadays.

The obvious buyer would be IBM (NYSE: IBM), where parts of CA could get baked into the Tivoli and WebSphere product lines very quickly. Also, the company's focus on the mainframe market could easily be folded into IBM's existing business. Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ), Dell (Nasdaq: DELL), and Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) are also on my Captain Obvious list, and Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) is the outsider in systems management services that could get in by way of a quick CA purchase.

CA has already done the hard work of identifying and then consolidating a number of promising cloud-era players and combining them with a well-known brand. All these buyers need to do is pick the whole agglomeration up wholesale, cut some costs where there are redundancies, and start reaping the synergies right away.

Add CA to My Watchlist so you can see if anybody makes a move on the company, then tell me if I'm making sense or not. The comments box is waiting for your input below.