Facebook’s DCIM Vendor CA Quits DCIM Software Market

CA Technologies has decided to get out of the data center infrastructure management market, where it was considered one of the leaders.

The New York-based IT infrastructure management software giant will no longer sell its stand-alone DCIM software solution, called CA DCIM, which has been deployed in data centers operated by Facebook and NTT-owned RagingWire, among others.

A relatively new category of products, DCIM software solutions have been met with a lot of skepticism in the industry. Although vendors and analysts say data center professionals generally understand DCIM better today than they did even one year ago, that skepticism, together with complexity and, in most cases, high cost of deploying DCIM, still prevent many companies from adopting the tools.

According to a forecast by Jennifer Koppy, research director at IDC who tracks the DCIM market, the market will reach $576 million in revenue this year – up from $475 million in 2014. It will get close to $1 billion in 2019, growing at a compound annual rate of 16 percent.

CA DCIM, which was built around the company’s previously existing energy monitoring product called ecoMeter, was one of four leading products in market research firm Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for DCIM last year, along with DCIM software by Schneider Electric, Emerson Network Power, and Nlyte Software. Gartner dropped CA from this year’s quadrant, published in October, leaving Schneider, Emerson, and Nlyte as the three remaining leaders.

Emerson, according to IDC, has the largest DCIM market share, followed by Schneider.

Instead of selling a stand-alone DCIM product, CA will focus on end-to-end IT infrastructure monitoring, including things like network, middleware, databases, and even applications, Fred Weiller, senior director of product marketing for CA’s Infrastructure Management Portfolio, said in an interview.

This will include data center power and cooling monitoring capabilities, the capabilities of ecoMeter, the genesis of CA DCIM. But it will not include other DCIM software components, such as visualization of the physical data center layout and asset management, he said.

The product did not end up on the chopping block because there was low demand, Weiller explained. It was more about aligning the company’s products with its strategic direction, which is about expanding reach across enterprise infrastructure horizontally.

“DCIM is what I would call a vertically integrated solution that has the asset component, the workflow component, and then the monitoring component,” Weiller said. “We decided that continuing to develop a more vertically integrated DCIM solution was not the best use of our resources in terms of providing new capabilities to our customers.”

CA will continue support for exiting CA DCIM customers, including services, maintenance releases, as well as capacity expansion. “We’re going to take great care of customers that have deployed that solution,” he said.