Successful implementations of APIs enable applications to talk to each other and share data with other authorized applications. And, according to CA:

“the combination of CA and Layer 7 solutions will help organizations to better manage and secure APIs and deliver more confidently and quickly the cloud, mobile and composite applications that run today’s business services.”

As GigaOM’s Stacey Higginbotham explained last year: APIs are “the connective tissue of the cloud.” A company can offer API access to its own web services or data either “for a fee or as a way of building out its own platform,” she wrote. Amazon, for example, publishes APIs to its own web services to enable customers to make use of those web services.

As an example, if you have an app for Acme Airlines that alerts you of flight delays or changes, that app was enabled by Acme’s APIs. The availability of well-written and documented APIs can build a network effect around the services themselves, making them more ubiquitous and potentially more valuable to users. Companies like Mashery, Layer 7, Apigee and Mulesoft make sure their customers’ APIs are well crafted to enable the smooth flow of authorized information to flow from one application to another.

The news of the buyout, terms of which were not disclosed, comes out of CA World, the company’s annual customer conference in Las Vegas. It’s a big week for legacy IT players to buy stuff: Earlier on Monday CA rival IBM said it’s purchasing UrbanCode to bolster its devops expertise.

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Citrix kicked up a ruckus six months ago when it — an OpenStack participant — offered up CloudStack to the Apache Foundation as an alternative open-source cloud.  Citrix had acquired CloudStack via its purchase of Cloud.com a year earlier.  Now, at Citrix Synergy Barcelona it’s continuing that push.

From the Citrix blog announcing the news, Cisco and Citrix are now partnering to build “integrated cloud orchestration” based on Citrix CloudPlatform – which is Citrix’ commercial CloudStack implementation. The resulting software will tie CloudPlatform into Cisco’s Nexus switches, Open Network Environment (ONE) and Unified Computing System (UCS) converged hardware.  And, CA’s Cloud Automation Suite and Nimsoft Monitor will support CloudStack.

In cloud, does maturity matter?

CloudStack is more mature than OpenStack and got early traction among service providers. Citrix says that 500 CloudStack-based clouds come online each month.

OpenStack, which is entering its third year,  has just transitioned from a Rackspace-led effort to a more multi-vendor-focused foundation.  The cloud battle is not completely black and white although proponents in both camps often make it seem so. Cisco, for example, is now in both camps — Cisco CTO Lew Tucker is vice chairman of the OpenStack Foundation.

“There isn’t as big of a rift as many make out,” Peder Ulander, VP of product marketing at Citrix told me via email.

 ”We [Citrix] are are still actively committed to making XenServer the best virtualization platform for OpenStack as well as doing a number of NetScaler integrations.  There has also been a lot of good work in the CloudStack community to bridge some of the efforts (ie. Cisco, Nicira and Shuberg Phillis working on Quantum integrations, CloudOps and the Citrix guys driving Swift integration and [Alcatel-Lucent's] cloudband solution delivering an OpenStack API support module for CloudStack).”

Citrix’s contributions to OpenStack are listed here.

Update: With cloud computing adoption still in its early days, it will be interesting to see how these open-source efforts fare —  OpenStack, CloudStack, OpenNebula and Eucalyptus –two other options — are all vying for customers and hoping to gain traction even as Amazon Web Services — the 800-pound gorilla in cloud computing — continues to forge ahead.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user mrs.tom

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The startup, which launched in June, is seeking its Series A round and is currently bootstrapped by the three founders. The company employs seven people and offers Software as a Service (Saas) as well as on-premise deployments. Unlike some of the other configuration management or other cloud-provisioning and management tools out there, ComodIT is aimed squarely at the enterprise — although anyone else can use it too. The company offers identity management and compliance-related features that enterprise customers need, but has taken an API-reliant approach more familiar to the dev-ops community.

However, it is also built so that other tools can easily integrate with it, meaning customers can bring their own cloud tools with features ComodIT doesn’t have. It even posted the code for Synapse, the software that governs its agent, which helps track virtual instances and other IT assets the ComodIT platform controls on GitHub earlier this month.

ComodIT will compete against clusters of open-source software as well as IT management software from established vendors like RightScale and giants such as CA, but it’s worth watching because it’s trying to bridge multiple clouds with its software. If it succeeds it could essentially wrap all available clouds into a user-friendly Platform as a Service (PaaS) with enterprise levels of control.

ComodIT is one of five finalists in our Structure: Europe Launchpad competition, which will take place on October 16th in Amsterdam. More information can be found here.

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The funding round was led by new investor Summit Partners with additional contributions from Grotech Ventures, Intersouth Partners and Boulder Ventures. It brings total funding to date to $45 million.

The company’s software — which monitors the use of IT assets, provides root cause analysis and automates remediation — is available in open-source and commercial versions. Three-quarters of the company’s user base is outside the US, mostly using its open-source version. “Just 20 percent of our commercial user base is international so we need hire there and better support our global partners Accenture and Cisco, which resell us,” Karpovich says.

Zenoss will also fund more research and development to improve the real-time analytics in its software, he said.

As more companies put compute loads outside their firewalls — to Amazon EC2 or other clouds — the need for a unified way to track operations is getting more critical. The CEO of a startup that’s making its name monitoring businesses’ use of Amazon cloud said the prospect of companies like Zenoss and Solar Winds making a concerted push there is what keeps him up at night. He did not want to be quoted by name.

Karpovich had no comment when asked whether Zenoss — which already offers a “Zenpack” to monitor AWS — will bulk up its efforts there,  but did say that Zenoss can “provide visibility” across the spectrum of physical, virtual and cloud resources.

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On Tuesday, the Gartner projection that in five years, the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO, cropped up several times at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce show. No wonder,  the company launched its new Social Marketing Cloud based on its Buddy and Radian6 acquisitions. But those mentions prompted an impromptu Twitter poll about whether it’s a good idea to have CMOs buying IT. The results were mixed.

Several respondents pushed a collaborative approach.  A better — and harder — way to attack overall corporate IT is to get all the departments working together, said GigaOM Pro analyst Jo Maitland. Clearly an optimist.

Others said situation will vary by company. Dana Gardner, principal analyst at InterArbor Solutions, expects that IT buying power will still be somewhat centralized but in some cases the IT person will learn more about marketing to help drive those decisions. In others, the marketing guys will get more IT-savvy. “It all depends who’s in the driver’s seat,” he said.

Marketing IT is not CIO IT

As always, a lot depends on definitions. If “IT” means the servers, storage, routers and databases that sit in a company’s data center, then no CMO makes that call. But the truth is, more spending is devoted to off-premises “cloud” services, including software as a service (SaaS). And in that case, it makes sense for the manager of a given department to help choose which services are used. And that, clearly, is what SaaS vendors like Salesforce.com are banking on.

“I see many CMOs using cloud-based services for marketing automation, response analytics, reputation management, content management, social media marketing and even application development,” said Andi Mann, a former analyst who is now VP of strategic solutions for CA.

The thought is, marketing departments should use the tools that help them market and not bog IT down in those decisions.

BYOD raises its head. Again.

But that decentralization of IT spending by departments can lead to problems and perhaps an over-proliferation of SaaS services bought by different departments that should be consolidated to save money.

The whole BYOD wave is also making itself felt as sales and marketing departments allocate money for iPads or other tablet and smartphones of the employee’s choice.

The problem, as has been widely reported, is providing secure  network  and data access to those myriad devices. That’s where old-school, unsung central IT comes in.  It’s fine that marketing organizations want to give their people the best tools — what gets complicated is when those tools impact the overall company infrastructure.

At that point, it still seems to me that one central authority –the CIO? CFO? CEO? — needs to rationalize all that.

As Mann points out:

Bottom line – for most orgs, marketing is just another business unit, and like all business units it is spending its own budget in part on directly acquiring technology. Just like finance, production, executive, operations, and others are. Gartner and IDC numbers both show technology spending outpacing IT departmental budgets, so that ‘extra’ technology budget must be going somewhere. I think it is going into ‘rogue IT’ spend by these business units — marketing included.

And that thought should give everyone pause.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Helder Almeida

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Traditional systems management companies like BMC and CA are trying to get better at automating and managing the trickier and more dynamic world of cloud computing deployments. Last year BMC bought StreamStep for enterprise application delivery, for example.

At the same time, younger DevOps vendors like OpsCode and Puppet Labs (see disclosure) are striving to provide more enterprise-class support and services. Opscode just announced a new enterprise services group as well as DevOps “solutions” to make it easier for large companies to automate configuration management.

Pushing out single-tier Windows applications is relatively straightforward, but “in real-life data centers, the automated deployment of complex multitier apps means that database updates have to be sent, that app servers must get new business logic and it all has to happen as a single deployment,” said Jody Hunt, DevOps solutions manager for Houston-based BMC. That’s the task that companies like VaraLogix, Nolio and UrbanCode take on.

VaraLogix does not compete with Opscode or Puppet Labs, but can actually work with them, said IDC research VP Mary Johnston Turner.

VaraLogix technology will become part of the new BMC Release Lifecycle Management product.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

 Feature photograph courtesy of Flickr user 401(K) 2012

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It also illustrates that John Swainson, the former IBM and CA executive who joined Dell as president of a new software group in February, is serious about building up the company’s cloud, services and software portfolios. When he took the job in February, Swainson said his goal “is to make software a meaningful part of Dell’s overall portfolio …. This is not the last thing you’re going to see from us.”

Wyse is just the latest acquisition Dell is using to expand beyond its PC roots (and the low-margin PC business). Last month, it purchased network and data security company Sonicwall, as well as backup, replication and recovery software specialist AppAssure.

The idea of a PC maker buying desktop virtualization technology which, in theory, makes it easier for companies to buy fewer PCs, seems counterintuitive until you realize that the PC business is not the place to be anymore. Just ask HP, which last year considered offloading its huge but margin-strapped PC unit.

“Until recently, you wouldn’t think a PC vendor would go after a desktop virtualization vendor. This just shows that the cloud value is more important than the device value,” explained IT consultant Dana Gardner, founder of consultancy Interarbor Solutions. San Jose, Calif.-based Wyse, founded in 1981,  fields a portfolio of thin clients and other software  and management technology that ties into desktop virtualization.

For PC makers, diversification is the name of the game

Increasingly, hardware companies like Dell and rival HP are trying to monetize all the non-PC gear on the back end of cloud services. “As margins for those end devices fall, these companies have to make money on the infrastructure that supports the delivery of services,” Gardner said.

To borrow the catchphrase used by all these hardware companies trying to remake themselves for cloud services, their new goal is to provide “end-to-end IT solutions.” In its statement announcing the deal, Dell said the addition of Wyse “will expand Dell’s desktop virtualization capabilities and provide new solutions and services opportunities for the full range of Dell’s enterprise offerings.”

Of course, Dell’s push beyond PCs actually goes back several years. In 2007, Dell bought EqualLogic for it’s iSCSI SAN storage expertise — and to lessen its reliance on storage partner EMC. Dell subsequently added Compellent to its storage arsenal in 2010 after being outbid by HP for 3Par. But as HP’s busy M&A activity highlights, Dell is not alone in this land grab to establish position in the data center and data-center-supplied services.

Terms of the Wyse purchase, announced Monday morning were not disclosed, although it is expected to close in Dell’s second quarter.

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