Wow, did you see what happened to Veracode? Oh no, no, it's not dead. It's been bought by CA

Sucked in for $614m

Investors in the cloudy app security biz Veracode are going to be celebrating after CA Technologies agreed to buy it up for $614m in cash.

CA announced the buy on Monday and said that it wanted to add Veracode's application security testing to its security lineup and devops business, as well as keeping its cloud apps more secure. CA thinks Veracode, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, will help it with larger enterprise customers while also snaffling the security firm's larger punters.

"We provide over 1,400 small and large enterprise customers the security they need to confidently innovate with the web and mobile applications they build, buy and assemble, as well as the components they integrate into their environments," said Bob Brennan, CEO of Veracode.

"By joining forces with CA Technologies, we will continue to better address growing security concerns, and enable them to accelerate delivery of secure software applications that can create new business value."

The Veracode acquisition is the latest in a long line of purchases by New York City-based CA. The giant snapped up Israeli testing outfit BlazeMeter last year, and in 2015 snaffled identity management outfit IdMlogic, cloudy devops supplier Rally Software, and automated testers Grid-Tools. It is a corporate sponge, in other words. A bottomless devourer of technology. A blackhole of software.

"Software is at the heart of every company's digital transformation. Therefore, it's increasingly important for them to integrate security at the start of their development processes, so they can respond to market opportunities in a secure manner," said Ayman Sayed, president and chief product officer, CA Technologies.

"Looking holistically at our portfolio, now with Veracode and Automic, we have accelerated the growth profile of our broad set of solutions. We now expect that the size of our growing solutions within our Enterprise Solutions portfolio will eclipse the more mature part of the Enterprise Solutions portfolio in FY19."

The deal is expected to be concluded by April. Veracode has received roughly $114m in funding since its founding in 2006. CA predicted the biz gobble would add a couple of percentage points to its global revenues and have a "modestly adverse impact" on earnings per share and cash flow from operations over the next two fiscal years. ®