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>.

Read Glenn O’ Donnels blog for more information <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.

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