Name change; it’s one way of leaving the past behind. For the second time in just five years, the company formerly known as Computer Associates, and then CA Inc, is changing its name. The previous name change was an effort to distance itself from a financial scandal that saw then CEO Sanjay Kumar plead guilty to fraud charges in 2006. But that rushed change of identity left the firm with a name that it now says doesn’t convey enough about what it does. It’s also not great for search engines: incoming CEO William McCracken said he was fed up with searching for ‘CA’ and getting results for the state of California. Hence the latest rebranding, say hello to CA Technologies.

CA Technologies has IBM to thank for its 30-plus years in business. The company was only able to exploit its focus on mainframe software thanks to IBM’s decision in 1969 (albeit under regulatory pressure) to unbundle the sale of mainframe hardware from mainframe programs and services.

With revenue up 2% in 2010, and profit up 15%, CA Technologies is looking in pretty good shape. The change of name is neither here nor there, but the enhanced focus on virtualisation and cloud will help maintain the company’s relevance to the modern IT organisation.

Let’s hope the new CA Techologies has finally shaken off some of the shackles and dubious sales practices of the past.

IT management software firm CA is to acquire Nimsoft in an all-cash transaction valued at $350m, in a move to expand its presence in emerging enterprise and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) markets. Nimsoft has approximately 800 customers, including nearly 300 MSPs and operates primarily in the US and Europe. It provides unified monitoring offerings for virtualised datacentres, hosted and managed services, cloud platforms and SaaS resources. With the acquisition, CA expects to add an entirely new set of customers to its base, which has historically focused on larger companies, and also expand its presence in growing international markets, where it expects cloud computing and hosted/managed services to play a central role in business development. The world is on the move to cloud computing so be careful about signing any long term software licencing deals that don’t have an option to move to cloud technology.