Yale Tankus

Cloudmation

2009-09-11T14:01:00.003-04:00

What is cloudmation?

It’s a Cloud Automation Platform or Real-time Infrastructure for the Cloud.

It includes the ability to orchestrate management tools to build, provision, move and tear down virtual services between cloud, physical and virtual infrastructures.

How do you build automation for the cloud, what do you need to bring it together?

What are the key requirements?

1. The ability to act on events from applications or the infrastructure in a real-time or near real-time basis

2. The ability to build automation by linking tasks

a. Not by writing scripts or code
b. Link tasks into complex processes using workflows appropriate for IT operations teams

3. Tie this to the underlying infrastructure

a. Without scripts and code

b. Integrated to operating systems, data bases, servers, networks, applications and storage devices

c. Work out of the box with existing investments in systems management tools and technologies

Have a look at the Opalis video with footage of Charles Crouchman our CTO outlining some of the requirements a Cloud Automation Platform or Real-Time Infrastructure for the Cloud. Automation Attributes for Cloud.

Cloudmation, available from Opalis today.

Yale

Proving the critics (competitors) wrong, again

2009-05-29T16:55:00.002-04:00

Don’t you just hate it when a rogue software sales person from a big technology company slams a smaller competitor with the same old line of falsehoods? I think that in general, big companies like to use fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) against more nimble competitors. It’s a common thing to do when you can’t compete on technology. It’s easier than providing more value to the customer or taking the time to fully work through and solve the needs of the customer.

I was talking to one of our sales execs the other day and he said that a competitor told his customer that Opalis didn’t have any customers. I would have loved to be on the call with the customer a few days later when our rep reviewed the Opalis Q109 results press release. Bam, instant loss of credibility for the FUD guy. Opalis has hundreds of customers, all of them under support so each customer sees continuing value in our solutions.

So we are proving the competitors wrong. We are winning new deals with big customers, scaling to the needs of very large production environments, expanding our global partnerships, announcing new ones and offering pragmatic capabilities for the cloud.

Our innovation and hard work continue to deliver results for our customers and partners. I’m sure our competitors will try to find new ways to compete with us but the old ones don’t work anymore.

Yale
ytankus@opalis.com

The Proof Zone

2009-05-12T09:07:00.003-04:00

Among many good things we are accomplishing, Charles Crouchman, Todd DeLaughter and I decided to blog and share more of what is going on in our world and with our customers. It’s been over two years since I joined Opalis and it’s been a great personal and professional experience.

If one word can best describe our company performance since I arrived it is proof. Our products and solutions are bringing significant value to existing customers as they increase their usage, expand worldwide, our new customers continue to achieve rapid creative growth. Our products work for the biggest most complex environments with Managed Service Providers, they work for the Enterprise and they work for our OEM partners.

Clearly IT Process Automation, Virtualization Life Cycle Management and Cloud Computing are all areas where Opalis brings value based on our proven and pragmatic capabilities.

We have been very focused on building products that are keenly focused on making IT operations teams highly successful. Charles will cover this in detail so I don’t want to go too far but in my view I have seen it time and time again first hand that our customers, the folks in IT operations are super productive with Opalis.

A few recent public references –

Rohm and Haas
We are very proud of their combination of vision and execution capabilities using Opalis. Rohm and Haas is a Fortune 500 company with annual sales of $58 billion and 46,000 employees worldwide. The team at Rohm and Haas licensed our technology in December of 2008, implementing a heterogeneous Incident Response solution Opalis Incident Response Solution on their own and rapidly put it into production in January of 2009. After only two weeks in production, Rohm and Haas reduced the number of alerts requiring manual intervention by 30%. That’s the sign of a great product design, vetted best practices out of the box and ease of use.

The next steps include doing more event consolidation, verification and remediation followed by orchestration with the Change Management system. With over 3000 applications and hundreds of Unix servers and Windows servers, Rohm and Haas’ goal is for Opalis to take over 75-85% of the work their managed service provider currently handles manually. That’s a solid strategy. Read more about the use of Opalis here - Rohm and Haas Press Release.

Fujitsu Services
Fujitsu Services, part of the largest business segment of Fujitsu Limited, is a leading provider of IT-based business solutions for the global marketplace. With approximately 175,000 employees supporting customers in 70 countries, Fujitsu combines a worldwide corps of systems and services experts with highly reliable computing and communications products and advanced microelectronics to deliver added value to customers. Headquartered in Tokyo, Fujitsu Limited reported consolidated revenues US$46 billion for FY08.

Having bought into the Business Service Management strategy from BMC, they needed a leading IT Process Automation vendor to bring it all together. After through evaluation and testing Fujitsu decided that Opalis was the choice for them. Opalis became the core to the architecture and performance requirements including global plug and play of multiple vendors while providing multi-tenancy, ISO 9000 certification, and very large scale production environment with performance that exceeds 1.3 million automation transactions per day and fit within their security model. Read more about the use of Opalis here - Fujitsu Press Release.

Many factors contributed to our continued proof points, but four stand out because of the major impact we expect them to have in the years ahead

Our commitment to deliver a platform and solutions that provide the fastest time to value in the IT Process Automation Market,
Engineered third party integrations and interoperability,
Worldwide customer proven best IT practices packaged up and delivered in an abstracted manner from the underlying technology and,
A commitment to give the IT operations teams something they can use without programming.

Opalis is uniquely positioned to help our customers with physical, virtual and cloud computing environments. In the coming weeks I’ll share more about how our managed service provider, enterprise and OEM partners leverage our capabilities.