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This is a recurring theme with a lot of these types of large companies (Microfocus, CA, Compuware, BMC) they'd buy up companies with niche or larger products, a

This is a recurring theme with a lot of these types of large companies (Microfocus, CA, Compuware, BMC) they'd buy up companies with niche or larger products, and the products would wither and die. If not simply disappear. One of my long term side projects has been an editor for fixed length files that uses cobol copybook to map the files. A common use for this type of thing is editing/viewing ACH files. There was at least one of these for PC's, but disappeared into one of these companies a long time ago. Note I'm looking for beta testers if anyones interested (email in profile).

CommieBobDole 9y ago
Definitely - CA is particularly bad about this; I've always thought of it as a killing jar for companies. Though with ArcSight, there really is no reason it had to go this way. When HP bought them, they were the undisputed market leader in an extremely lucrative and growing segment that has continued to grow in the years since. If CA is a like a trucking company that buys old but still serviceable trucks on the cheap, and then runs them into the ground without maintenance, HPE and ArcSight is like buying a Ferrari at top price, leaving it to molder in the woods somewhere for a decade, then selling it for scrap. Just a ridiculous waste by a company that has nothing going for it but momentum.
gozur88 9y ago
Sometimes they don't want the product at all (or the employees). Rather, they're buying customers. I worked for a company that wrote logistics software and we got bought out by a much larger company. They stopped all new development on the product, laid off half the developers, and had the other half working on tools to transition customers from what had been our product to theirs. Tax law used to facilitate this kind of thing, too, because of goodwill writedowns. Might still be true - I don't know.
nradov 9y ago
As a counterpoint, CA purchased Rally (an agile project management tool and issue tracker) several years ago and they're been steadily improving it ever since. That's probably because there's a lot of direct competition from similar products such as Jira.

CommieBobDole 9y ago

Definitely - CA is particularly bad about this; I've always thought of it as a killing jar for companies. Though with ArcSight, there really is no reason it had to go this way. When HP bought them, they were the undisputed market leader in an extremely lucrative and growing segment that has continued to grow in the years since. If CA is a like a trucking company that buys old but still serviceable trucks on the cheap, and then runs them into the ground without maintenance, HPE and ArcSight is like buying a Ferrari at top price, leaving it to molder in the woods somewhere for a decade, then selling it for scrap. Just a ridiculous waste by a company that has nothing going for it but momentum.

gozur88 9y ago

Sometimes they don't want the product at all (or the employees). Rather, they're buying customers. I worked for a company that wrote logistics software and we got bought out by a much larger company. They stopped all new development on the product, laid off half the developers, and had the other half working on tools to transition customers from what had been our product to theirs. Tax law used to facilitate this kind of thing, too, because of goodwill writedowns. Might still be true - I don't know.

nradov 9y ago

As a counterpoint, CA purchased Rally (an agile project management tool and issue tracker) several years ago and they're been steadily improving it ever since. That's probably because there's a lot of direct competition from similar products such as Jira.