(Hard hat area) This was a busy week in acquisitions for Microsoft. Most in healthcare were focused on the purchase of Sentillion to work with Amalga, but there 
were additional happenings occurring this week too.
Microsoft Acquires Sentillion – Single Sign On To Work With Amalga and More…
Opalis is located in Canada and has been a long time Microsoft Gold Partner. With the current focus on healthcare applications and automation at hospitals, this type of technology automates some of the reporting and configurations perhaps done manually by a person. This is a business intelligence type of process that analyzes, predicts and makes changes based on reporting, usage, etc.
Also in the news this week was the agreement with NetApp from Sunnyvale, California as reported by Xconomy. The Server & Cloud Division (SCD) was also recently formed by Microsoft to combine the efforts of Windows Server, Windows Azure, SQL Server, SQL Azure, Visual Studio and System Center into one designated division with focus on the utilization of the above mentioned products.
For more information you can check in to the Azure blog for updates. Below is a partial clip from what I have covered related to Azure in the recent 
past including a look inside the Azure cloud data center in Chicago (video). The video helps explain what the clouds and data centers look like, how they are managed, etc. BD
Cloud Services from Microsoft – Azure Services Platform Announced
“(Hard Hat Area)Here’s a bit more about Azure, the “cloud” from Microsoft. In the press release it mentions Sessmic and I have been using it for a while to include the new Web and Desktop versions and it works very well. Not too long ago Microsoft was looking for clients to try hosting their SQL server platforms on the cloud. The service has a name now, SQL Azure. There are those mass facilities being built and opened to store the data such as in this recent post about the ocean container building in Chicago that opened.”
The Azure Cloud in Chicago – Massive New Data Center from Microsoft (Video)
From the Opalis Website:
Hi, my name is Todd DeLaughter, and I am the president and CEO of Opalis Software. Today we are announcing that Microsoft has acquired Opalis.
IT Process Automation is a powerful capability that can help streamline IT operations by removing much of the overhead associated with manual response to IT problems.
I became personally interested in the IT Process Automation market after running the HP OpenView business for four years. The market had a host of systems management tools at that time that could monitor and report on an IT issue but literally nothing that could provide an automated response to that IT issue.
This automated response is a core building block for the future of IT – closed loop remediation of IT issues. It also happens to be the foundation for the automation necessary to deliver cloud computing - self adjusting pools of computing resources that can be tuned based on real-time events. This is actually possible today with virtualization software, such as Microsoft Hyper-V Server, and automation tools, like Opalis and Microsoft System Center. The vendor who pulls this together with the cleanest, simplest approach will bring cloud computing to the masses.
Opalis has over 300 satisfied customers today, including many of the largest IT Managed Service Providers, demanding customers who deliver IT as a business and expect solutions that deliver results for their customers.
The powerful combination of Opalis with the Microsoft System Center product line means that IT Process Automation will become a mainstream offering throughout all levels of IT shops, large and small. Customers will benefit from Opalis’ enterprise class performance and scalability as well as our elegant out of the box user experience. No coding or scripting is required to use Opalis so IT experts from operations to development teams can participate in driving IT efficiency.
Microsoft has always impressed me with their next generation view of how systems management tools should cleanly integrate to provide an easier user experience without the baggage of complexity that all of the existing legacy systems management tools carry. Combined with Opalis, System Center will be able to interoperate with all of those legacy tools so customers can take a ‘land and migrate’ approach with Microsoft versus a ‘rip and replace’ approach as they build out their next generation virtualized data centers – of course with an automation foundation based on Opalis! I believe, with the Opalis technology, Microsoft will have the most complete virtualization stack available from any single vendor.
You will hear more in the coming weeks and months from Microsoft about their plans for Opalis from this site.
Meanwhile, I would encourage you to read up more on today’s announcement, and listen to Brad Anderson, corporate vice president at Microsoft, talk about the news here.
Regards,
Todd
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