Mergers and acquisitions enjoyed a robust 2005 in the enterprise market. In early 2006, Computer Associates (NYSE:CA) is getting a quick start on the new year's dealmaking with yesterday's announcement that it will purchase of Wily Technology for $375 million in cash.
Wily certainly has no problems with growth. In 2004, revenues grew 48%; in 2005, it appears that revenues surged by 75% to about $60 million.
Wily is a leader in the enterprise application management (EAM) industry. As more companies put mission-critical transactions on the Web, Wily helps manage and monitor these crucial Web applications. This requires strong monitoring and analysis of huge amounts of transactions. A slowdown in a company's servers may drive away customers unhappy with the sluggish performance; Wily alerts companies to these problems instantly, allowing the company to start fixing its woes right away. Without Wily's teachnology, companies may not know about a brewing problem until customers start complaining -- and by then, it's already too late.
Wily already has strong relationships with such infrastructure products as BEA's (NASDAQ:BEAS) WebLogic server, IBM's (NYSE:IBM) WebSphere application server, Oracle's (NASDAQ:ORCL) application server, and Sun's (NASDAQ:SUN) Java System application server. According to Gartner, Wily leads the EAM market, which is expected to grow to $1 billion in 2007.
Interestingly enough, Wily was on the path to an IPO. However, the IPO market has been soft, and standout companies are instead selling out.
The weak IPO market is doubtlessly good news for companies desperately seeking growth, like Computer Associates. The company has been weaning itself from its reliance on mainframes; as computing power gets less expensive, and more efficient Web technologies emerge, there's less of a market for such massive computers.
But a company as small as Wily won't "move the needle" much for a large firm like Computer Associates. So even though Computer Associates' acquisitions have been well-thought-out, and its turnaround from an accounting scandal in 2004 has been effectively dealt with, the company will still likely be a plodder going forward, like the rest of its peers.
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Fool contributor Tom Taulli does not own shares mentioned in this article.
