Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
CA, Inc.
CA Technologies sold software that big companies use to manage their computer systems, and it is now owned by Broadcom.
CA Technologies makes the unglamorous software that keeps huge computer systems from falling apart. Banks, airlines, insurers, and government agencies run on a tangle of mainframes, servers, databases, and networks, and CA's tools help the people in charge watch all of it, spot problems, and control who gets access to what. It built its name on mainframe software — the heavy iron that still processes a shocking share of the world's financial transactions — and later spread into distributed systems, cloud, and mobile.
The business is a quiet toll booth. Once a big company installs CA's software deep in its operations, ripping it out is painful and risky, so customers keep renewing their licenses year after year. That made CA a reliable cash machine, though not a fast-growing one, and its long history is messy: it was founded in 1976 as Computer Associates and spent decades as an aggressive acquirer of other software firms, with a notorious accounting scandal in the early 2000s that led to prison time for top executives and a major restatement. The ending is the important part. Chipmaker Broadcom bought CA in 2018 for about $18.9 billion, and CA shares stopped trading. Broadcom folded CA into its growing software business alongside VMware, which it acquired in 2023, and now sells CA's products through its software unit. So CA no longer exists as an independent public company — it's a brand and a product line inside Broadcom.
That makes CA a useful case study in what private equity and strategic buyers love: sticky, boring, high-margin software with loyal enterprise customers. The technology rarely makes headlines, but the money it throws off does.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026