As 451 group reported some weeks ago <here> and Forrester revoked <here> some days later, Run-Book-Automation

and IT Process Automation

leader Opalis is indeed sold to Microsoft, as it is announced on Technet.com Website <‘Microsoft Acquires Opalis Software’>.

You can also find some interesting reading from Opalis’ CEO Todd DeLaughter at the Opalis Blog <‘Opalis joins the Microsoft System Center product lineup’>.

Opalis will be combined with Microsofts System Center product line. More informationen about the acquisition can be retrieved <here>.

As if I knew it, it put the tag ‘rumors’ to my post from the Oct. the 23rd. Now I learned from from Glenn O’Donnell’s Forrester blog for Infrastructure and Operation professionals that this rumor did not become true, yet. From my point of view this would have been a great fit, because it MIcrosoft is gaining ground in the IT Management field and Opalis would be a perfect addition to SCOM. So we have to keep calm, and see what will happen. Maybe some time from now, we will know what was behind this rumor.

Read Glenn O’ Donnels blog for more information <LINK>.

The battle over Automation Software makers goes to the next round: This time in the spotlight, canadian Run-Book-Automation and Orchestration software maker Opalis <LINK>.

Opalis started several years ago with the Opalis Robot, a tool that helps to automate administrative tasks aka Job scheduling and Process Automation. Later they renamed the robot to ‘Opalis Integration Server

‘, offering a very nice GUI and plenty of templates and ready made integration modules to a high variety of administratives software packages. After massivly ‘Cloudifying’ their offerings, Gartner elevated Opalis to not only beeing market leader, but also being able to provide RBA 2.0

capabilities <LINK>.

Through some strategic partnerships, like the  OEM-Deal with CA <LINK> Opalis was very successfull, so they were able to report appr. 100% increase in license sales for Q2 and Q3 2009 compared with last year. In April 2009 they annouced that they will partner with Microsoft and deliver an Orchestration and Intelligent Automation solution for Microsoft System Center <LINK>, which turned out to be a perfect match.

According to the 451 Group <LINK>, Opalis will be acquired by Microsoft for $60m, so after some quiet time the consolidation of the RBA (Run-Book-Automation) market is goining on.

Just as a bunch of customers and partner are enjoying the great EMCWorld show in Orlando, AT&T announces a new Cloud Storage offering, based on their round about 40 datacenters worldwide and the freshly announced EMC Atmos internal to external Federation

functionality. The service named Synaptic <LINK> is available for selected customers and will probably reach general availability later this year. In the coming month there might by other offerings based on the so called EMC Atmos Online solution <LINK> which is currently in beta phase and strives to extent the existing Atmos functionality towards the clouds.

While mother EMC takes storage to cloud, the daughter VMWare also is attacking the marking with is Cloud Operating Systems, which opens their worlds most famous Virtualization plattform to cloud providers. VSphere will allow to move virtualized systems and services from a private cloud to public cloud offerings provided by roughly 500 worldwide VMWare cloud service providers <LINK>.

Welcome to the cloud club.

Still beeing in Las Vegas after 3 interesting days at IBM’s Tivoli Pulse 2009 <LINK>, I want give you some thoughs on IBM’s cloud strategy. Attending only one Session on Clouds (Manageing Clouds), I got the impression, that clouds are not a big deal, if you stick with IBM.

After months of rumors on “Blue Cloud offerings”, they unveiled their strategy and showed that using IBM Tivoli products can help you setting up a complete privat, public or mixed offering. Based on the characteristices of Cloud computing:

-          Elastic Scaling

-          Rapid provisioning

-          Resource Abstraction

-          Flexible pricing

IBM has almost everything in place to set up a cloud offering: Ranging from Virtualization and Provisioning, over open Standards for SOA and Information management up to a complete IT Service Management solution (based on IBM Tivoli), that monitors and controls the processes around the offering. Sounds quite easy, doesn’t it.

IBM is pushing pressure on the competition on the cloud front. To emphasize this, they also start a new offering based on AWS EC2 to provide parts of their Software portfolio (DB2 and Informix Databases, as well as Webshere Portal and Middleware) to customers on a On-demand pricing model <LINK>. This offering might be used for setting up rapid test and developments environments. Dana Gardner has more on this topic <LINK>.

This step is kind of suprising, because some people might have though, that Big Blue was going to have a competing offer for public clouds. I think that this step proves, that IBM won’t battle Google and Amazon, instead they are focussing on Enterprises. This is what their customers demand.

In combination with these releases, IBM also presented a bunch of customers for their offerings <LINK>, to prove that their offering are real.

So it seems, that cloud computing could be quite easy, if you have a good set of products and some good, strategic partners. Let’s wait and see.

Automation, which seams to me right after cloud computing the hottest issue these days, comes in many flavours. Nearly every vendor offers some kind of  “Automation” solution. Especially in times, where the admin/server ratios skyrocketing from 1:5 up 1:10000 there seems to be some logical link between these two topics. Is Automation the key to managing clouds and enterprise cloud computing?

To enrich the discussion and enlighten you about the different types of Automation, I wrote an article on Chris’ Boos Automation-blog.

http://www.hcboos.net/article-and-essays/types-of-automation

/

I’m really looking forward to your comments.

Roland

“What would you do if you had 1,000 times more data?” asked Google Senior Software engineer Christophe Bisciglia some time ago. To me this seems to be THE big point with cloud computing. After learning about economical and market forces driving the cloud wave, I still think that money and flexibility alone are only half the truth. Even if those two arguments are important for most private and corporate IT users, there are a number of drawbacks like security issues or the question of who is in control of the data.

My guess is, that clouds will have their final breakthrough when we’ll have more applications that exploit the new possibilities the cloud computing paradigm offers. More stuff like Google and Amazon. Or even smaller but innovative like Gigaspaces.

I just saw a great offering from Sun for startups that prefer serverhugging

It is titled “Jumpstart Your Startup“.

Not only one gets cheap SUN hardware and access to hosted offering (DataPipe, Joyent, Layeredtech) but you also get free software and, here comes the twist, free VC connections. Isn’t this great?  To me this isn’t realy that cool offering, I waited for. The emphasis is still on hardware. I wonder, what kind of metal you’ll get for 750$ bucks.

Please notice the cloudfree sky in the image, maybe that is a hint, where the journey goes to…

It looks like the financial crisis will help to clean not only financial markets, but also puts some pressure on top 2009 IT issues.

After breaking news in 2008 that Novell is extending their stand in IT Service Managment and Data center automation with acquiring Platespin and Managed Objects <HERE>,  these days SUN is shifting gears by buying QLayer <READ_HERE>. Sure, they lost ground in recent months and they had to move. Let’s wait and see how other big competitors like Cisco respond. Not to ask what Big Four will pull out of their hats. And there are other minor albeit open conquerors which are quite successful.

To me clouds in all their facets and IT Automation (in different disguise – <READ_HERE>) are tight close together, because they scale IT Operations to dimensions far from beeing able to be handled manually. Maybe it’s a good time for digging out old (and new) autonomic computing concepts and to put flesh on the bones.

2009 will be an interesting year, possibly bringing some groundbreaking advances to IT and business.

So let’s tell everyone to stop whining about recession but rather to look forward.

Roland

In the keynote at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas, Gartner VP Thomas Bittman predicted that ‘cloud computing will eventually support thousands of specialized providers, with services being put together like Lego blocks’ <READHERE>. My guess is that Mr. Bittman tried to say, that cloud computing will intrinsically tied to Saas. But is that true? Let’s first discuss what the point with cloud computing is. Is it just a new buzzword for modern service providers with very flexible provisioning features and/or highly distributed high capacity datacenters? Or is it a new computing paradigm, enabling users to write applications capable dealing with thousand times higher computing capacity, like Google asks students promoting their cloudy mindset <HERE>. So whats the point?

The close relationship between Clouds and SOA is common sense (see interview with IBM Autonomics director <HERE>). That may be the reason, why all big IT vendors like IBM, HP, Microsoft, Novell and thelike  have broadened their portfolios in the past few years and will be able to not only offer platforms for building service enabled applications, but are also providing/buying technology for automating data center management and provisioning.

So managing clouds is the new Infrastructure paradigm (vs. on-premise or ’serverhugging’), while SOA might be the new application development paradigm (vs. ERP dinosaurs)? If it was that simple, then we probably will have thousands of providers, providing 2nd Tier service offerings and several large scale 1st Tier infrastructure providers offering cheap and enormous computing power.

Even if I haven’t looked into topics like security or IAM, the paradigm shift may be a long way, thinking of todays heterogenous computing landscape. Key to success might be the possibility to be able to provision, manage and support large scale (utility) systems. For that reasons I’m really glad to work in the interesting area of ITSM, BSM and Automation <RELATED_READING>, which definitly will be the key to the future.