Thanks to this article on El Reg this morning, I see the potential end of an age coming again. Wily was one of the early Java profilers that actually worked well. In many application server shops, its presence is ubiquitous.

It’s been a long running joke among my friends that when whenever Computer Associates buys anything, start looking for a new product. CA will mess up the pricing, lose site of the product’s goals, drive out the key employees (Wily is fairly small, so this will be devastating!) and generally leave existing customers flapping in the wind. This has been occurring on a regular basis since before CA entered the PC market, and has continued relentlessly. The day that CA purchased the ARCServe product line, a file backup utility that was in wide-spread use for file servers, I strode in my boss’s office and told him we needed to start looking at Backup Exec—which we soon bought licenses for.

Will this be the same? Will I need to tell my clients to take an even more serious look at HP’s Transaction Analyzer? Will anyone be proclaiming “The King is dead. Long live the King!”? And just who will the new king be?

We’ll soon see.

In defense of CA, they have done a couple of smart things lately. They did divest Ingress. They did dump their old CEO after the accounting fiasco. They are even in the black as of 2005 3rd calendar quarter.

And as an apology to CA–sorry, those were the only two smart things I could think of.

Update: Analyst Zaineb Bokhari thinks the Wily acquisition is a good thing for CA. It doesn’t say anything about Wily customers and employees. He continues to rate CA’s stock as hold.