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By Cara Garretson
Microsoft announced Friday it has acquired Opalis Software, developer of IT process automation applications, to bolster the capabilities of the software giant’s data center management offerings.
Opalis, based in Toronto, Ontario, develops “run book” automation software that helps IT departments manage, integrate, and automate IT processes, including incident, problem, configuration, and change management. The private company will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft; the purchase price was not disclosed.
Microsoft plans to integrate Opalis’ software into its System Center, a collection of server software designed to help manage network and client management tasks for both physical and virtualized systems. This integration will help Microsoft System Center customers automate essential IT processes in growing data centers, said Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s management and solutions division.
“I believe Opalis’ software together with the System Center suite will improve the efficiency of IT staff and operations, and customers will gain greater process consistency,” Anderson said in a post on Microsoft’s System Center blog. “Opalis’ software captures the IT processes, in a documented and repeatable way, which can be run over and over again. These capabilities will be added to Microsoft System Center to help customers automate complex IT processes, increase cost savings and shorten timeframes for IT service delivery across physical, virtual and cloud computing environments.”
Reliably automating IT processes across the data center will help customers not only save money, Anderson adds, but also ensure that the services a company’s business units depend on are always available.
“This is especially important as our customers build out highly automated and scalable virtual environments,” he said, quoting a Gartner statistic that states by year-end 2010, at least 50 percent of the automation and workflow management tasks in support of virtual server infrastructures will be supported by evolving run-book automation-based tools.
In addition, Opalis’ software to automate IT processes will balance the features found in Microsoft’s Service Manager -- slated for delivery sometime next year -- which is designed to provide automation tracking around change management and people processes, he said.
Microsoft chose to acquire Opalis because its products already integrate with System Center, many of Opalis’ customers use System Center, and it will allow System Center to integrate with other infrastructure management products, such as offerings from CA, BMC and HP.
Before leading Opalis, the company’s president and CEO, Todd DeLaughter, ran HP’s OpenView division for four years. Opalis’ CTO, Charles Crouchman, was senior vice president of development at CA.
DeLaughter believes that adding automation to the IT management process will be essential for organizations that use cloud computing services to create “self adjusting pools of computing resources that can be tuned based on real-time events,” he said in an Opalis blog post. “The vendor who pulls this together with the cleanest, simplest approach will bring cloud computing to the masses.”
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