CA Xtrackers California Municipal Bonds ETF

Technology solutions provider CA Technology (CA) recently announced that it will provide technical assistance to VMware customers to ensure the smooth transition to VMware vSphere 5.  Customers can ease their migration to VMware vSphere 5 by using CA Virtual Placement and Balancing, a new solution that helps consolidate virtual machines, hosts and clusters at lower upgrade costs and improves operating efficiency.

The upgradation to VMware vSphere 5 will consolidate the customers’ virtual machines, hosts and clusters, thus resulting in cost optimization. On the other hand, this will also help customers predict how their hosts and workloads will perform through consolidation.

CA Virtual Placement and Balancing uses advanced predictive analytics designed to accurately project how resources will be affected as transaction volumes or other circumstances change. Using these predictions, the solution automatically produces a prescription for configuration of the virtual landscape.

Apart from providing technical expertise to other companies, the company is strengthening its position in the cloud computing space. CA recently revealed that its cloud computing, energy management and service assurance solutions will support StratITsphere’s new package of cloud-based services (Nimbus) and other offerings.

Nimbus was developed on CA AppLogic cloud platform and will be delivered on the same, including virtual private data centers (VPDC) with full failover and disaster recovery capabilities.

This should help StratITsphere's Fortune 1000 customers access the dynamically provisioned and secure cloud services, providing an agile and highly efficient platform with lower capital investment compared to traditional computing solutions.

The company’s recent acquisition of the cloud computing company, Oblicore Inc. testifies to its increasing focus on the cloud computing business. Cloud computing is witnessing strong demand and is being increasingly adopted by not just the small and medium businesses, but also larger players.

CA Inc. posted decent first quarter results, exceeding earnings estimates. Revenues also improved on a year-over-year basis. However, the product demand trend was moderate in the reported quarter. Considering the quarter’s revenue backlog, we believe the fiscal 2012 guidance is a bit conservative.

We further believe that CA Inc.’s endeavor to return shareholder value through share buybacks and dividend increases will boost investor sentiment. On the other hand, we are apprehensive about intense competition in the software & cloud computing space from big players, such as International Business Machines (IBM) and Hewlett-Packard Company (HPQ). In addition, its high debt balance and European exposure may pose some challenges going forward.

CA currently holds a Zacks #3 Rank, which implies a short-term Hold rating.

 
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