Opsware to announce strategic acquisition Thursday --the battle for the BIG OS
Thursday at 6 am Pacific, Ben Horowitz, CEO and Sharlene Abrams, CFO, will host a teleconference to announce an acquisition that extends Opsware's IT automation capabilities.
Opsware was founded by Marc Andreessen, of Mosaic and Netscape fame. (Interestingly, Michael Moeller, who worked as comms director at Opsware is now working in PR at Hewlett-Packard.)
I remember when the company was called Loudcloud. Noone could figure out what it did. I recall the head of a PR company telling me that his company was thinking of taking Loudloud on as a client, but couldn’t understand what the company did. This was in 2001.
Their messaging has improved quite a bit since then; not that Mike didn’t do an excellent job, its just that the world wasn’t quite ready for the “cloud” and those types of hazy concepts. I understand it now.
This is the big battle for the BIG OS—the data center operating system—that’s what I see. Lots of ways to get there, too. Veritas, EMC, IBM, CA, HP, MSFT, and of course IBM. What about the enterprise players? I don’t see them doing much in this area.
About Opsware Inc. (NASDAQ: OPSW)
Opsware Inc. is the world's leading IT automation and utility computing software company. The growth of the Internet is driving a shift from client/server computing to Web architecture. With this shift comes an overwhelming proliferation of servers and applications, creating massive complexity that makes an automated IT model a necessity. The Opsware System automates the complete IT lifecycle and delivers utility computing by enabling IT to automatically provision, patch, configure, secure, change, scale, audit, recover, consolidate, migrate, and reallocate servers and applications. Over 250 of the world's largest companies, outsourcers and government agencies use Opsware to deliver this new, automated model of IT. For more information on Opsware Inc., please visit our Web site at www.opsware.com.
