Now CA’s got a market cap of $11 billion and SAP’s got $1.8 billion in the bank. So it appears that if such a thing were to happen it would be what they call an MOE, a merger of equals.

There’s this odd chemistry between SAP and CA. Twice now CA has gotten close to raiding SAP for a CEO and twice the guy it was thinking of poaching became CEO of SAP instead.

The first was SAP sales chief Leo Apotheke, who was reportedly a lead candidate at CA before his prospective move was outed by the press.

When Apotheke balked, CA went with IBMer John Swainson, who lasted until late last year when – reportedly because CA’s stock price dropped during his administration – another CEO search was mounted even though CA chairman Bill McCracken, another ex-IBMer, really wanted the job and effectively took over day-to-day operations during the hunt.

Apotheke of course went on to become deputy CEO, co-CEO and for seven brief months the sole CEO of SAP, a tenure that ended abruptly on Super Bowl Sunday.

The second guy was reportedly SAP sales chief Bill McDermott, the American who became co-CEO of SAP that fateful Sunday.

A well-placed source says McDermott was CA’s second choice for CEO after Oracle co-president Chuck Phillips, who reportedly accepted the job. CA supposedly told McDermott he was out of the running a few weeks ago but McDermott failed to communicate that fact to SAP, which reportedly knew he was under consideration for the CA job. Poof, he becomes co-CEO of SAP.

Phillips would be CEO of CA today if somebody intimate with CA’s boardroom secrets hadn’t tipped Oracle off to his imminent departure, an inconvenient exit considering Oracle was about to close on its hard-won Sun acquisition.

It’s hard to tell whether Oracle CEO Larry Ellison had an inkling one of his co-presidents could be anywhere near the orbit of his great rival, SAP, but, whether or not, he reportedly wanted Phillips to stick around for a couple more years.

Hence, the frat house prank of outing Phillips’ eight-and-a-half year relationship with a woman not his wife on billboards in Times Square near Phillips’ office, San Francisco near Oracle’s headquarters and Atlanta near where Phillips’ wife lives. Given CA’s checkered past and despite the fact that it could really use Phillips to do the SAP deal – and slim down the place either before or after – the CEO job passed to McCracken within hours of Oracle celebrating its takeover of Sun.

CA needed to get a permanent CEO in place and, with one of ex-CEOs doing a 12-year stretch in a federal prison in New Jersey, it couldn’t exactly afford to hire a CEO with a double life.

If Phillips had moved from Oracle to CA, he might have been richer – although that’s hard to believe – but not necessarily happier considering McCracken reportedly wanted him to execute on McCracken’s strategy, which is reportedly focused on the cloud.

In that case, note that CA Thursday joined the Cloud Security Alliance as a corporate member to help establish and promote best practices for security in cloud computing, meaning to kick in its identity and access management expertise. It said it is “working with enterprise customers and cloud service providers to securely adopt and deliver cloud services.” SAP could sure use a bit of that.

Six days after Phillips was forced to admit that a picture of him and his ex-girlfriend canoodling was hanging over Times Square, CA named board member and executive chairman Bill McCracken CEO. He’s the guy who’s been running the company since John Swainson’s reportedly forced retirement was announced in September. An ex-IBMer and an ex-Swainson pal, it was no secret he really wanted the job.

That was the day after Oracle announced it had closed the Sun deal and Phillips led the victory parade filling in for Oracle’s unexpectedly absent other co-president Safra Catz.

Given the circumstances a little deconstruction is merited here.

First know that two tried-and-tested sources say Phillips was supposed to get the CA job, which makes sense since he was “ascloseasthis” with CA when he was a Morgan Stanley analyst and who better than the architect of 60 Oracle acquisitions to maybe sell the joint. And the move wouldn’t have been much of an effort; his Oracle office is in the same building in New York as CA’s real headquarters just 12 floors apart.

Then consider that Phillips’ mistress Yavaughnie Wilkins, a 42-year-old journalist student with questionable writing skills and no visible means of support, probably didn’t have the money to buy the billboard ads – at a reported cost of $750,000 a month – and that the charlesphillipsandyavaughniewilkins.com web site they advertised was too darn sweet and sentimental, when you think about it, to be the work of a woman scorned. It looks more like the work of a woman celebrating her boyfriend’s 50th birthday last year and their long relationship before he supposedly went back to his long-suffering wife.

Then consider that it might not have been opportune for Oracle to have the guy in charge of integrating Oracle and its problematic $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems bolt amid the celebration of its triumph over the European Commission’s lengthy resistance to the deal and ahead of the expected four-month assimilation process.

Then just suppose that somebody at CA – could have been McCracken, could have been CA president and COO Michael Christenson, worried that Phillips would clean house, or somebody else privy to CA’s boardroom secrets – tipped off Oracle that its number two-and-half was going to bolt.

Then imagine that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison gets really ticked off at this act of lèse majesté and peeled off some pocket change to fix Phillips’ wagon. C’mon, who else has the motivation and the money?

CA needed to get a permanent CEO in place and, given its tainted history, couldn’t exactly afford a CEO who doesn’t look like an upright, forthright Boy Scout. Meanwhile, Oracle needed Phillips to stick around long enough to insure an unclouded celebration and a smooth integration of the Sun acquisition, and, given Oracle’s lurid history, Phillips’ public peccadillo is hardly a taint at all.

Considering all that, the billboards were a Machiavellian masterstroke to keep Chuck Phillips in his place, maybe not for the next four months, which would have been ideal, but at least for last week, which Larry will tell you went swimmingly.

CA isn’t saying what it paid but the 451 Group figures it’s a “low multiple.” And it thinks Cassatt did about $12 million last year, a figure that could be generous. Cassatt only had a dozen customers – and a promising pipeline according to what Coleman said a few weeks ago. He has since become telephone and email shy. CA won’t come to the phone either.

Cassatt had a problem figuring out exactly what it wanted to be during its six-year run. Since the cloud chatter started last year, it’s identified with that and that’s the way CA is playing it, as a cloud efficiency expert.

CA was Cassatt’s last shot at anything that resembled a dignified exit. The start-up, which liked to think of itself as being ahead of its time and too disruptive, as a company whose failure lay in vastly underestimating the social and cultural challenges its policy-based data center automation presented to the customer’s entrenched staff, had tried peddling itself to all the brand names and couldn’t cut a deal.

Maybe that’s because a 30-second elevator description of Cassatt would have taken 20 minutes. Explaining what it did was never Cassatt’s strong suite and that was apparently because it didn’t know itself and couldn’t get backing for what might have been in demand like HPC or disaster recovery. It can after all fail over and restart an entire data center in 45 minutes without any human intervention.

The software it started with from Unlimited Scale reportedly didn’t work and Cassatt never settled on a fallback position, effectively becoming an industrial chameleon taking its coloration from the latest buzzword.

Anyway, a continent away from Cassatt’s Silicon Valley digs, CA says it’s picking up Cassatt’s engineering team and adding its widgetry to its infrastructure management solutions.

Cassatt CTO and EVP of product development Rob Gingell and Cassatt chief scientist and co-founder Steve Oberlin, two of the many stars and prima donnas to have passed through the company’s portal during its lifetime, have joined CA, along with their team of developers, engineers and other key employees. A few weeks ago that was around 50 people.

Coleman, who started BEA and was its first CEO, isn’t going along.

CA says it has also picked up “several” Cassatt patents and patent applications, as well as other IP, which sounds like all of it.

What CA winds up doing with Cassatt remains to be seen. Cassatt’s next-generation product, code named Skynet after the fictional self-aware AI computer system in the Arnold Schwarzewnegger movie “The Terminator,” was supposed to blur the lines between data centers, which probably meant delivering images to both private and public clouds like Amazon’s.

In a canned statement, CA’s chief architect Donald Ferguson said, “Cassatt invented an elegant and innovative architecture and algorithms for data center performance optimization. Incorporating Cassatt’s analysis and optimization capabilities into CA’s world-class business-driven automation solution will enable cloud-style computing to reliably drive efficiencies in both on-premises, private data centers and off-premises, utility data centers. We believe the result will be a uniquely comprehensive infrastructure management approach, spanning monitoring, analysis, planning, optimization and execution.” We’ll see. Maybe a big company will have more luck than an unknown.