CA blows on fingers, grasps testing vendor BlazeMeter

Veteran software outfit CA has hoovered up Israeli testing outfit BlazeMeter to burnish its DevOps and testing credentials.

The buy is the latest example of CA’s ability to surf the tides of software fashion, which over the last 40 years has seen it waft from mainframe utilities, to PC productivity apps to storage to whatever we’re talking about this week.

CA said it has snaffled five-year-old BlazeMeter for its performance testing nous. The Tel Aviv and Palo Alto-based firm claims to offer its customers the ability to “run massively scalable, open source-based performance tests against all of your apps, from web and mobile apps to microservices and API.”

Its offering is compatible with Apache JMeter, and professes to support any tests users care to upload from that environment.

CA has been reinventing itself as Agile/DevOps tools vendor recently, alongside its more established businesses. Ayman Sayed, president and chief product officer, CA Technologies, said in a canned quote: “The acquisition will reinforce our leadership position in continuous testing, and our efforts to democratize performance testing as organizations accelerate their DevOps journey to drive speed and quality in the delivery of new software updates and innovations.”

BlazeMeter is private, and no price tag for the deal was published. However, a hint of what CA is getting comes in a blog post from founder and CEO Alon Girmonsky.

He claimed: “BlazeMeter has been growing rapidly for the past four years. We are now well over 60 employees spread evenly across two offices - Palo Alto and Tel Aviv. We serve 3,000 customers, out of which over 300 are considered large enterprise customers.”

He added: “This merger will enable us to continue building our technology while enjoying the vast resources of CA Technologies to better serve our customers... CA Technologies and BlazeMeter share a common vision for the future of open source-based continuous testing, and we are excited about the opportunity we bring as one company.”

Like all good DevOps/whatever startups, BlazeMeter offers, free, basic, pro and enterprise subscriptions, priced from nothing, $99, $499 and POA accordingly.

Despite its own comparative youth, BlazeMeter has previous on the M&A front.In 2014, it absorbed analytics specialst Loadsophobia, whose founder Andrey Pkhilko, became BlazeMeter’s chief scientist. ®