Opsware, Inc. was a software company based in
Sunnyvale, California
Sunnyvale () is a city located in the Santa Clara Valley in northwest Santa Clara County in the U.S. state of California.
Sunnyvale lies along the historic El Camino Real and Highway 101 and is bordered by portions of San Jose to the nor ...
, that offered products for server and network device
provisioning
In telecommunication, provisioning involves the process of preparing and equipping a network to allow it to provide new services to its users. In National Security/Emergency Preparedness telecommunications services, ''"provisioning"'' equates to ...
,
configuration
Configuration or configurations may refer to:
Computing
* Computer configuration or system configuration
* Configuration file, a software file used to configure the initial settings for a computer program
* Configurator, also known as choice bo ...
, and
management
Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business.
Management includes the activitie ...
targeted toward enterprise customers. Opsware had offices in
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
,
Redmond, Washington
Redmond is a city in King County, Washington, United States, located east of Seattle. The population was 73,256 at the 2020 census, up from 54,144 in 2010.
Redmond is best known as the home of Microsoft and Nintendo of America.
With an ann ...
,
Cary, North Carolina
Cary is a town in Wake and Chatham counties in the U.S. state of North Carolina and is part of the Raleigh–Cary, NC Metropolitan Statistical Area. According to the 2020 Census, its population was 174,721, making it the seventh largest mun ...
, and an engineering office in
Cluj, Romania.
In July 2007,
HP announced that it had agreed to acquire Opsware for $1.65 billion in cash ($14.25 per share). The acquisition closed on September 21, 2007.
HP subsequently split into
HP Inc. and
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
The Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE) is an American multinational information technology company based in Spring, Texas, United States.
HPE was founded on November 1, 2015, in Palo Alto, California, as part of the splitting of the ...
(HPE). The latter included Opsware's products and services and, in 2017, the HPE Software business group spin-merged with
Micro Focus
Micro Focus International plc is a British multinational software and information technology business based in Newbury, Berkshire, England. The firm provides software and consultancy. The company is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is ...
.
History
The company that was formerly known as Loudcloud was founded on September 9, 1999 (i.e., 9/9/99) by
Marc Andreessen
Marc Lowell Andreessen ( ; born July 9, 1971) is an American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer. He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser; co-founder of Netscape; and co-founder and general partner of Silico ...
,
Ben Horowitz
Benjamin Abraham Horowitz (born June 13, 1966) is an American businessman, investor, blogger, and author. He is a technology entrepreneur and co-founder along with Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He previously co ...
,
Tim Howes, and In Sik Rhee as a managed
services provider. The company was one of the first to offer
software as a service
Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software.
SaaS is co ...
computing with an Infrastructure as a Service model. According to ''
Wired
''Wired'' (stylized as ''WIRED'') is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San ...
'', Loudcloud was one of the first vendors to talk about
cloud computing
Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mu ...
and Software as a Service.
In June 2000, Loudcloud raised $120 million, in what was at the time the largest second round of funding. This was shortly followed by a $100 million raise by one of its competitors,
Totality Corporation (at the time known as MimEcom).
After selling the operations side of the business to
EDS in the summer of 2002, Loudcloud became Opsware and went to market as a technology company, offering the software that had been developed internally to support customer systems via automated server life-cycle management. In 2004, Opsware acquired
asset management
Asset management is a systematic approach to the governance and realization of value from the things that a group or entity is responsible for, over their whole life cycles. It may apply both to tangible assets (physical objects such as buildings ...
systems provider Tangram Enterprise Solutions, and in February 2005 acquired network device configuration management vendor Rendition Networks. In July 2006 Opsware acquired CreekPath for its Data Center Automation (DCA) product offering to add
provisioning
In telecommunication, provisioning involves the process of preparing and equipping a network to allow it to provide new services to its users. In National Security/Emergency Preparedness telecommunications services, ''"provisioning"'' equates to ...
of storage components. In April 2007 Opsware acquired Seattle-based iConclude and its run-book automation software in order to integrate datacenter management from end-to-end.
In July 2007,
HP announced that it had agreed to acquire Opsware for $1.65 billion in cash ($14.25 per share), sixteen times revenues. It was HP's third largest acquisition at the time behind
Compaq
Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced ...
and
Mercury Interactive
Mercury Interactive Corporation was an Israeli company acquired by the HP Software Division. Mercury offered software for application management, application delivery, change and configuration management, service-oriented architecture, change r ...
. HP marketed Opsware products and
software as a service
Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software.
SaaS is co ...
solutions as part of the
HP Software Division.
In 2015, HP's Software division was spun off to become part of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Two years later in 2017, HP Software merged with UK-based Micro Focus in a spin-merge. All former Opsware tools are now grouped under the Micro Focus Hybrid Cloud Management suite.
Products
Opsware had three main systems that it marketed. The Server Automation System (SAS) was designed to provide provisioning, policy enforcement, compliance reporting, and
patching
Patching is a small village and civil parish that lies amid the fields and woods of the southern slopes of the South Downs in the National Park in the Arun District of West Sussex, England. It has a visible hill-workings history going back t ...
of
Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for se ...
,
Unix
Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, ...
and
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...
servers across thousands of servers. It is now sold as HP Server Automation software.
The Network Automation System (NAS) was designed to provide network device provisioning, policy enforcement, security lock-down, software management, and compliance reporting across thousands of devices from over 500 variants of device vendors, models, and OS versions. This product was also
OEM'd by
Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, ...
and was called the Cisco "Network Compliance Manager" (NCM). It is now sold as HP Network Automation software. The third system marketed by Opsware was the Process Automation System (PAS), designed to provide run-book automation from former partner iConclude (who was acquired in March 2007). It is now sold as HP Operations Orchestration software.
Customers
Opsware customers included its now parent
HP,
GE,
EDS (whose acquisition was completed by HP August 26, 2008, and is now called
HP Enterprise Services
DXC Technology is an American multinational information technology (IT) services and consulting company headquartered in Ashburn, Virginia.
History
DXC Technology was founded on April 3, 2017 when the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE) ...
), the
Federal government of the United States
The federal government of the United States (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) is the national government of the United States, a federal republic located primarily in North America, composed of 50 states, a city within a fede ...
and numerous
Fortune 500
The ''Fortune'' 500 is an annual list compiled and published by ''Fortune (magazine), Fortune'' magazine that ranks 500 of the largest United States Joint-stock company#Closely held corporations and publicly traded corporations, corporations by ...
companies who used the software to automate their IT infrastructure.
References
*Lawton, Christopher and Kingsbury, Kevin
"H-P Makes Move Into Data Centers" ''The Wall Street Journal'', July 23, 2007. Accessed July 23, 2007.
External links
{{Portal, Companies
HP IT Management Web site*
HP Software as a Service Web site
Software companies established in 1999
Companies based in Sunnyvale, California
Hewlett-Packard acquisitions
1999 establishments in California