What will happen to Opalis support for OpenView, Tivoli, VMware, etc.?
Microsoft is doing a bit of holiday shopping today. It announced two acquisitions, confirming the much-rumored purchase of network management company Opalis. It also announced an intent to buy health care ID management software maker, Sentillion. With these buys, Microsoft has acquired a mere four companies in 2009.
For the Opalis deal, terms were not disclosed. The acquisition has been rumored since October, and at that time, one analyst pegged the deal at about $60 million. Opalis makes IT automation software (ticketing, workflow, virtual machine lifcycle and so on). Its customer list is a whose-who of global corporate names, the comany says: Accenture, VMware, Fujitsu Services, Computacenter, Toyota, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Dow Chemical, Yellowbook, Chico’s, British Telecom, Bank of New York, and Woolworths.
Opalis had partnered with Microsoft in the spring to integrate its software into Microsoft System Center. But it was hardly a Microsoft-centric product. In fact, in addition to counting VMware as a customer, it had also integrated its wares with VMware’s Infrastructure 3. It had also been integrated with HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, CA Service Desk (and had an OEM agreement with CA), BMC Patrol and Remedy, EMC Lagato and Smarts … and just about every other Microsoft network management competitor. (On an interesting side note, Opalis’ CEO Todd DeLaughter was previously general manager of Hewlett-Packard’s OpenView systems management division.)
The deal is being positioned as a cloud-computing play, as Opalis has been talking up its role to help companies manage cloud apps. In October, Opalis CEO Todd DeLaughter said in a press release: “With Opalis, customers are prepared to take advantage of cloud computing, which requires automation to dynamically allocate and consume cloud resources. Opalis is uniquely positioned as the provider that unites existing investments in technology and leverages them for re-use, while embracing new capabilities as third parties bring them to the market.”
So what will happen to Opalis’s product support of those other vendors’ products? That functionality will be embedded in System Center. According to Brad Anderson’s post on the System Center Team blog (where the Opalis acquisition was announced):
“Out of the box, Opalis products integrate with System Center, and will allow System Center to integrate with other infrastructure software from CA, BMC, HP and others to integrate across an IT organization. …
“So what does this acquisition mean for Opalis and Microsoft customers? Opalis will continue to fulfill its existing commitments to customers and continue to deliver support as we transition Opalis to the Microsoft systems and processes. What’s interesting is that a large majority of Opalis customers use System Center today. We intend to make RBA capabilities a core part of System Center going forward. You can get more details of the transition at Microsoft Pathways.”
If you are an Opalis customer that doesn’t use System Center, you should expect the phone to ring soon. Today, Microsoft Gold Certified reseller, Altosoft said it would like to offer you a dashboard to help bridge Opalis/System Center with your non-System Center Opalis tools. Altosoft’s dashboards products were previously private labeled as “Opalis Dashboard” and resold by Opalis, but the company will now sell its products directly to the combined Opalis and Microsoft System Center installed base of customers. The Altosoft dashboard is based on Microsoft .Net. Not sure how non-System Center customers might feel about that.
Microsoft also took out its wallet to purchase ID management software maker Sentillion, which specializes in security products for the health care industry. Terms of this deal were not disclosed either, but Microsoft says it expects the acquisition to be finalized in 2010.
Sentillion will be integrated with Microsoft’s Amalga Unified Intelligence System (UIS), which digitizes health care records and allows various health care roles to view the data across patients. For instance, combined data can be viewed by a physician, a quality control person or a financial analyst. Microsoft said it is used in more than 115 hospitals. Sentillion’s products are used in 1,000 hospitals, the company says.
Sentillion will continue to operate from its headquarters in Andover, Massachusetts.
The Opalis and Sentillion acquisitions are Microsoft’s third and fourth purchase for 2009, according to Wikipedia, a year in which Microsoft faced significant financial hurdles including layoffs. The other two were the May 7, 2009, buy of interactive online gaming company BigPark and the September 2009 purchase of desktop software development maker Interactive Supercomputing. By contrast, Microsoft bought 16 companies in 2008 and 14 in 2007.
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