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.