Hi, my name is Todd DeLaughter, and I am the president and CEO of Opalis Software. Today we are announcing that Microsoft has acquired Opalis.
IT Process Automation is a powerful capability that can help streamline IT operations by removing much of the overhead associated with manual response to IT problems.
I became personally interested in the IT Process Automation market after running the HP OpenView business for four years. The market had a host of systems management tools at that time that could monitor and report on an IT issue but literally nothing that could provide an automated response to that IT issue.
This automated response is a core building block for the future of IT – closed loop remediation of IT issues. It also happens to be the foundation for the automation necessary to deliver cloud computing - 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.
Opalis has over 300 satisfied customers today, including many of the largest IT Managed Service Providers, demanding customers who deliver IT as a business and expect solutions that deliver results for their customers.
The powerful combination of Opalis with the Microsoft System Center product line means that IT Process Automation will become a mainstream offering throughout all levels of IT shops, large and small. Customers will benefit from Opalis’ enterprise class performance and scalability as well as our elegant out of the box user experience. No coding or scripting is required to use Opalis so IT experts from operations to development teams can participate in driving IT efficiency.
Microsoft has always impressed me with their next generation view of how systems management tools should cleanly integrate to provide an easier user experience without the baggage of complexity that all of the existing legacy systems management tools carry. Combined with Opalis, System Center will be able to interoperate with all of those legacy tools so customers can take a ‘land and migrate’ approach with Microsoft versus a ‘rip and replace’ approach as they build out their next generation virtualized data centers – of course with an automation foundation based on Opalis! I believe, with the Opalis technology, Microsoft will have the most complete virtualization stack available from any single vendor.
You will hear more in the coming weeks and months from Microsoft about their plans for Opalis from this site.
Meanwhile, I would encourage you to read up more on today’s announcement, and listen to Brad Anderson, corporate vice president at Microsoft, talk about the news here.
Regards,
Todd
Friday, December 11, 2009
Friday, April 24, 2009
Fear Nothing!
CEO Ramblings – The heterogeneous hairball of IT and thinking in a fundamentally different way about managing it
I am just returning to Toronto from San Francisco where I saw some very cool three wheel Aptera electric cars in front of the Westin, location for the America’s Growth Capital Emerging Technologies conference this week. If you haven’t seen these cars, go take a look. Wired online did a nice write up this week.
The purpose for my trip was to talk about how to sort out some of the complexity of managing physical, virtual and cloud environments with the mixture of heterogeneous management tools and systems deployed in enterprise IT today. The good news is that IT process automation can help sort this mess to bring a consistency of process execution within IT while delivering the control lacking to date, all while driving down OpEx cost.
As I wrote the presentation and really thought about what it takes to move IT process automation forward, I decided to tell a story connected to my past as an analogy. I was born and raised for the first years of my life in Sioux City, Iowa, in a single story, red brick, flat roof building that was purpose built in the ‘20s or ‘30s for telephone operators. You can just picture the rows of women manually connecting the calls via the switchboard. I say women because they were the only people hired to do this job. In the early days, hiring telephone companies actually measured the length of a woman’s arm as part of the hiring criteria to ensure she could fully reach the top of the switchboard. Everything was optimized around efficiency of a human connecting a call.
Somewhere along the way, with the growth of call volumes, it was calculated that unless something was done to improve productivity, one out of two people in the US would have to be telephone operators. Today that would be about 150 million people.
Clearly something changed. There was an inflection point and automated switching came into existence. But can you imagine the first guy who brought the idea up to the operators or the guy who managed the operators? ‘Say Mac, I have a swell new idea to complete calls and take the operator out of the picture’. ‘But Ralph, we can’t take the operator out of the picture. They are the ones completing the calls. If the calls aren’t completed we don’t earn money. I couldn’t possibly try something so risky as removing the operators’.
Sound familiar?
Guess what – Ralph was a visionary, calls became automated, operators didn’t go away but fewer of them were needed because the mind numbing work was automated. The operators could focus on exceptions or conversations where people by necessity had to interact.
Could all the operators evolve to new roles? Probably not all, but the best ones did. Interestingly, telephone companies started out using young boys as operators because the telegraph companies had used them to deliver telegraphs. However, they found that the young boys didn’t have the maturity, patience or focus to handle sitting at a switchboard for hours at a time so the telephone companies evolved their hiring to bring in women.
Today, because of virtualization, one of the technologies creating additional complexity, we have the capability to automate 70-80% of operational processes and tasks necessary to run a data center. When coupled with IT process automation to provide the intelligent policy decisions, the ‘when and why’ become coupled with the ‘how’ that virtualization delivers.
So who are you going to be like – Mac or Ralph?
I’ll tell you one thing, managed service providers are a collection of Ralphs. They fear nothing and they are pulled to IT process automation because they know it is the only possible way to dramatically bring down the cost and complexity of managing IT while improving service levels. Labor arbitrage from off-shoring to low cost locations will only take you so far. These MSPs are ‘no-shoring’, actually taking out the manual effort and using automation to complete a majority of IT operations processes and tasks.
The good news is that if you are in enterprise IT, you can do it to – you just have to think differently and fear nothing. We will help.
Next blog I will talk about your IT process automation journey and what the end state can look like as well as the path to take you there.
Todd
Chief Bottle Washer
I am just returning to Toronto from San Francisco where I saw some very cool three wheel Aptera electric cars in front of the Westin, location for the America’s Growth Capital Emerging Technologies conference this week. If you haven’t seen these cars, go take a look. Wired online did a nice write up this week.
The purpose for my trip was to talk about how to sort out some of the complexity of managing physical, virtual and cloud environments with the mixture of heterogeneous management tools and systems deployed in enterprise IT today. The good news is that IT process automation can help sort this mess to bring a consistency of process execution within IT while delivering the control lacking to date, all while driving down OpEx cost.
As I wrote the presentation and really thought about what it takes to move IT process automation forward, I decided to tell a story connected to my past as an analogy. I was born and raised for the first years of my life in Sioux City, Iowa, in a single story, red brick, flat roof building that was purpose built in the ‘20s or ‘30s for telephone operators. You can just picture the rows of women manually connecting the calls via the switchboard. I say women because they were the only people hired to do this job. In the early days, hiring telephone companies actually measured the length of a woman’s arm as part of the hiring criteria to ensure she could fully reach the top of the switchboard. Everything was optimized around efficiency of a human connecting a call.
Somewhere along the way, with the growth of call volumes, it was calculated that unless something was done to improve productivity, one out of two people in the US would have to be telephone operators. Today that would be about 150 million people.
Clearly something changed. There was an inflection point and automated switching came into existence. But can you imagine the first guy who brought the idea up to the operators or the guy who managed the operators? ‘Say Mac, I have a swell new idea to complete calls and take the operator out of the picture’. ‘But Ralph, we can’t take the operator out of the picture. They are the ones completing the calls. If the calls aren’t completed we don’t earn money. I couldn’t possibly try something so risky as removing the operators’.
Sound familiar?
Guess what – Ralph was a visionary, calls became automated, operators didn’t go away but fewer of them were needed because the mind numbing work was automated. The operators could focus on exceptions or conversations where people by necessity had to interact.
Could all the operators evolve to new roles? Probably not all, but the best ones did. Interestingly, telephone companies started out using young boys as operators because the telegraph companies had used them to deliver telegraphs. However, they found that the young boys didn’t have the maturity, patience or focus to handle sitting at a switchboard for hours at a time so the telephone companies evolved their hiring to bring in women.
Today, because of virtualization, one of the technologies creating additional complexity, we have the capability to automate 70-80% of operational processes and tasks necessary to run a data center. When coupled with IT process automation to provide the intelligent policy decisions, the ‘when and why’ become coupled with the ‘how’ that virtualization delivers.
So who are you going to be like – Mac or Ralph?
I’ll tell you one thing, managed service providers are a collection of Ralphs. They fear nothing and they are pulled to IT process automation because they know it is the only possible way to dramatically bring down the cost and complexity of managing IT while improving service levels. Labor arbitrage from off-shoring to low cost locations will only take you so far. These MSPs are ‘no-shoring’, actually taking out the manual effort and using automation to complete a majority of IT operations processes and tasks.
The good news is that if you are in enterprise IT, you can do it to – you just have to think differently and fear nothing. We will help.
Next blog I will talk about your IT process automation journey and what the end state can look like as well as the path to take you there.
Todd
Chief Bottle Washer
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
