Guild Companies

Opsware, a private company specializing in tools for managing operating systems and application software, yesterday announced a key strategic alliance as it inked a deal with IT infrastructure maker Hewlett-Packard. While Opsware and HP have been working together informally, HP will now be bolting the Opsware System onto its Utility Data Center product for virtualizing and provisioning servers, storage, and network bandwidth. HP Services will also be able to sell, integrate, and support the Opsware System. HP's global reach should help Opsware to better establish itself in the crowded systems management market.

For its part, Opsware now has one of the biggest server vendors in the world aggressively pushing its products into the data center. You might have heard of Opsware under a different name--Loudcloud--but you have almost certainly heard of its founder, Marc Andreesen, one of the original founders of Netscape. After selling off the Internet hosting business of Loudcloud last year to Electronic Data Systems, the Sunnyvale, California, company changed its name, trimmed down to about 100 employees, and created a system management suite that helps install, update, maintain, and dynamically provision instances of the five major operating systems--Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX--and some 60 popular applications (including middleware, databases, and Web infrastructure programs) that ride on top of those operating systems. There is even a special edition of the Opsware System for blade servers, which have a unique architecture compared to standalone servers.

According to Andreesen, who was present on a conference call yesterday announcing the HP deal, "companies are still cleaning up the mess after the dot-com boom." What he meant by this, he explained, was that the shift from a client/server architecture with relatively few servers to a Web architecture with hundreds or thousands of servers has caused the portion of IT departments dedicated to actually managing the infrastructure to balloon by 70 percent, with people costs growing by 40 percent. According to surveys performed by Opsware among its data center customers, a company installing and managing 100 servers could cut the costs of managing those 100 servers by 50 percent using a combination of HP's Utility Data Center and the Opsware System, and could drop deployment times by 80 percent (down from 156 days to 36 days in the case study cited in the call).

HP is keen on Opsware not only because it extends the reach of the Utility Data Center product that the company announced last year, says Nick van der Zweep, director of utility computing at HP, but because integrating the two products is something that UDC customers and prospects have been asking for specifically. Why HP hasn't acquired Opsware in a strategic move to prevent others from doing so is unknown, but after seeing Terraspring acquired by Sun Microsystems in November 2002 and Think Dynamics eaten by IBM only a few weeks ago, the thought must have crossed HP's mind.

Whether HP proposed to acquire Opsware, neither van der Zweep nor Andreesen would say. The Terraspring acquisition by Sun has to have made HP jumpy, particularly because the Utility Data Center virtualization and provisioning solution is a set of Intel-based and HP 9000 Unix servers running the Terraspring software. Think Dynamics' ThinkControl provisioning suite was an alternative to Terraspring, at least until IBM bought it, and HP had signed up to sell it on its ProLiant servers. With IBM acquiring Think Dynamics and Sun buying Terraspring for its "N1" server and storage virtualization efforts, HP might have simply felt safe partnering with Opsware because the other two key players in enterprise computing have already made their choices, and Microsoft seems to have little interest in managing Unix and Linux server provisioning and virtualization and absolutely believes that the best thing to do is throw all your servers out and move everything to Windows.