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.

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

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I’m really looking forward to your comments.

Roland

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