CA said first thing Monday morning that it's going to buy privately held NetQoS Inc for $200 million cash, its biggest acquisition since it took over Wily Technology more than three years ago.

CA figures the purchase, which should close by the end of December, will dilute its fiscal 2010 earnings "slightly."

NetQoS traffics in network performance management and service delivery solutions and CA wants it for its network flow monitoring, unified communications management and response time analytic network widgetry, skills that can be applied to cloud computing as well as networks, systems and application performance.

CA describes the acquisition as building on the assets it acquired from Bill Coleman's failed Cassatt operation earlier this year as well as its organically grown Spectrum Automation Manager for dynamic performance-based automation of physical, virtual and cloud computing environments.

It says that as "enterprises and service providers become increasingly reliant on the shared infrastructure of private and public computing clouds, CA and NetQoS will provide a robust level of network and systems traffic management that will be critical to successfully delivering cloud-based services."

The 10-year-old NetQoS claims upwards of a thousand active customers worldwide, including some Fortune 100s. Its revenue last year came to $56 million.

CA says NetQoS' revenues have shown a 58% CAGR over the past five fiscal years.

CA means to retain most of NetQoS' 250 people. Initially the operation will be run as an independent entity within CA's Infrastructure Management and Automation business unit reporting to Ajei Gopal. NetQoS CEO Joel Trammell will join CA as SVP and general manager and CTO Cathy Fulton will be SVP, software engineering.

The combination of CA's eHealth Network Performance Manager, its Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and the NetQoS Performance Center is supposed to give CIOs and network engineers and operations managers better visibility and control of critical services in their physical and virtual network and systems environments, enabling customers to deliver high-quality services such as unified communications.

And by linking transaction views to the infrastructure, CA's Wily Application Performance Management and the NetQoS Performance Center are supposed to enable a new quality of experience, in which the infrastructure is application-aware. CA says this "360-degree view of applications will provide customers both an outside-in and inside-out perspective of their business and IT services, something no other single vendor can provide."