Automation software maker Opalis announced today it would beef up its flagship product with 90 process templates to help customers add automation to existing tasks. Twenty of the new templates address technologies such as virtualization and security.

Opalis Integration Server 5.3 falls into a category of what research firm Gartner calls “run book automation” products that enable IT operations to automate daily tasks which may have previously been completed manually or with scripts.

“Run book automation promises to provide a new way to manage IT, providing a better, more efficient way to address business concerns,” said David Williams of Gartner in a July 2006 report titled, “Run Book Automation: The Drivers and Inhibitors.”

The software installs on a dedicated server and works with third-party management products, such as HP OpenView, or virtualization vendors, such as VMware, to automate tasks, including trouble-ticket creation and provisioning a new virtual machine. The software requires no agents be distributed, and it works with the APIs provided with third-party software and systems. Customers create tasks once, and the software can be configured to perform the tasks automatically based on triggers.

For example, a database administrator who has to shut down a server to apply patches using the software distribution features of SMS can build some of the basic manual steps to configure SMS and execute services into an automated process using the drag-and-drop interface of Opalis Integration Server. The Opalis software then will execute those SMS steps.