CA Technologies scouts for acquisitions in India

CA Technologies, a Nasdaq-listed IT management software and solutions company, is pursuing acquisition opportunities across geographies, including in India, with a ticket size of between $10 million and $500 million, according to chief executive officer William E McCracken.

“We are constantly scouting for potential targets across the world, and we probably have between 200 and 300 companies on our merger and acquisitions' radar at any given point of time as there is so much of innovation happening in the industry. Obviously, India is a good technology location and hence is a good target for us,” he told mediapersons here on Tuesday.

In the last two-and-a-half years, the over $4.5-billion company had invested around $2 billion in acquisitions, including Oblicore, 3Tera, nimsoft, NetQoS and 4Base. It also bought Arcot Systems for $200 million, which has a 115-strong research and development (R&D) centre in Bangalore, during this period.

McCracken said that CA was expected to invest anywhere between $300 million and $500 million during this year for acquisitions, primarily driven by cloud technologies, mobile device management, application lifecycle management and everything wrapped around it, service assurance and infrastructure management.

The buyouts will help in aligning those technologies with that of CA’s and develop global solutions, he said. “We are not in any specific discussions right now. We make decisions just as a prospect,” he said, while declining to spell out a time frame.

To hire 500 more
CA’s single-largest R&D facility, the India Technology Centre (ITC), currently has 2,000 personnel of its over 13,000 employees globally, developing common platforms across the its products and building them into solutions. The ITC develops about 30 per cent of CA's global products.

McCracken said the ITC, the company’s third centre globally with the other two being in Sillicon Valley in California and Prague in Europe, had so far seen an investment of over $60 million in infrastructure alone.

“The ITC is a key part of our strategy. With the growth of the marketplace at over 7 per cent, it is an enormous opportunity for us to do business here. Taking our employee strength at the ITC to 2,500 in the next five years is a reasonable target for us,” he added.

Meanwhile, CA, in partnership with the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H), on Tuesday opened the University Innovation Centre at its ITC. The centre will blend the expertise of CA software thought leaders with IIIT-H’s research resources to create and drive delivery of new products and centres.