CA, the IT management software maker, is becoming an aggressive player in the cloud computing arena.

Observers are noting that the company’s third cloud-related acquisition, of a firm called 3Tera, which developed cloud computing technology AppLogic, will help CA make it easier for customers to move to cloud environments. (CA announced its intended purchase last week.)

And interestingly enough, a story I read said that the purchase will “put the company in a good position to later sell its management products designed to monitor and control services in the cloud.”

“The most interesting thing about 3Tera is their ability to give both service providers and enterprises a way to take existing applications and bring them to private and public cloud environments via an elegant interface,” said Jay Fry, vice president of business unit strategy for CA, in the piece. “The process used to be done very manually, but AppLogic automates it and smoothes that transition.”

This is the third cloud-based acquisition by CA, which bought automation vendor Cassatt last summer and Oblicore earlier this year.

Industry observers generally think that the Oblicore purchase means that CA is more committed to bringing the cloud into more mainstream service management disciplines, for example, SLMs. And CA’s purchase of Cassatt boosted CA’s own data center management and automation products, applicable for cloud management services.

What do I think? It certainly looks like CA is gearing up to become a full-service cloud computing company, especially after creating its Cloud Products and Solutions business unit. This new level of aggressiveness is increasing the level of competition among cloud services providers of all kinds.

Generally, competition is a good thing! It leads to lower prices and better services – at least according to Capitalism 101 textbooks. But we’ll have to wait and see how well CA takes up tasks such as cloud monitoring – considering the growing capabilities of its competitors.