Microsoft Buys Opalis To Bolster Physical, Virtual Data Center Automation

Microsoft has acquired Opalis Software, a developer of IT process automation software, and plans to use it to bolster its Microsoft System Center suite of software for managing physical and virtual IT environments across data centers, client computers, and devices.

Microsoft, which on Friday unveiled the acquisition of privately-held Opalis in a blog posting, called Opalis an important part of its dynamic data center initiative.

In Microsoft parlance, the dynamic data center is a push to use a combination of virtualization, end-to-end monitoring, data protection and recovery, and controls under a unified management system to help customers lower costs while improving data center efficiency and availability.

Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Management and Service Division, wrote in the blog posting that Opalis' software, together with System Center, will "improve the efficiency of IT staff and operations, and customers will gain greater process consistency."

Customers are looking for increased operations automation as they build out highly automated and scalable virtual environments in order to not only reduce costs but also to ensure the "services that drive their business are always available," Anderson wrote.

The Opalis software is easy to use and quick to deploy, Anderson wrote. It also integrates out of the box with System Center to allow it to "integrate with other infrastructure software from CA, BMC, HP and others to integrate across an IT organization," he wrote.

Todd DeLaughter, president and CEO of Opalis and a former manager of Hewlett-Packard's OpenView management software business, wrote in a separate blog post that automated response is a core building block for IT, and is the foundation for cloud computing, which he defined as self-adjusting pools of computing resources that can be tuned based on real-time events.

"This is actually possible today with virtualization software, such as Microsoft Hyper-V Server, and automation tools, like Opalis and Microsoft System Center. The vendor who pulls this together with the cleanest, simplest approach will bring cloud computing to the masses," DeLaughter wrote.

Financial details of the acquisition were not revealed.

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