November 29, 2007

Opalis, one of the few pure plays left in the IT process automation arena (also tagged with the unfortunate name “Run Book Automation”), is adding SOA support and the ability to debug IT process workflows before you deploy them, as part of a major refresh to its suite for version 5.4.

IT process automation automates the workflows that are used for managing IT infrastructure. For instance, if you need to provision some new VMware containers, it provides a way to standardize and configures the steps you take to conduct the provisioning, and run them as an automated process or workflow.

The SOA piece involves supporting the exposing of these processes, so you can invoke them from something like an IT service desk suite as the result of a trouble ticket or some other incident. It’s similar to a recent enhancement from CA, for instance, that lets you invoke a batch job through a web service.

What Opalis’ SOA support does not include is exposing actual functionality from the IT infrastructure management tools that it orchestrates through its workflows. Those will still be triggered through support of proprietary APIs.

Another limit to web services support is the way that IT services are listed. Theoretically, a UDDI registry could list IT services. However, according to CTO Charles Crouchman, UDDI is not as well suited as the Service Catalog specifications supported by the ITIL framework.

Version 5.4 also adds a form of debugging, where you can insert break points in your IT process automation workflow to check that the steps work, and where some of the pieces (such as a VMware server) are not yet in place, you can insert dummy functionality to simulate the step.

Finally, on the topic of virtualization, Opalis is adding new pre-built processes for virtualization, so that there are now workflow templates for processes such as provisioning VMware containers.

Crouchman quoted a recent Forrester research report that predicted the market for IT process automation would grow to $700 million by 2015. To us that sounds like a rather modest number, considering the fact that by 2015, IT process automation is likely to become just another component of IT Service Management.

At this point, two of Opalis’ primary rivals, Opsware and RealOps, have been snatched up by HP and BMC, respectively. Ironically, Opalis; CEO. Todd DeLaughter, came from HP. And as you might guess, existing IT infrastructure management providers are scrounging their IT operations product portfolios to see if any of the automated workflows that exist in various products could be expanded into more generalized IT process automation offerings. Nonetheless, to us the obvious question remains, will Opalis get acquired by IBM or CA?

Other infrastructure management providers already have pieces of process automation that might serve dedicated purposes, such as batch job workflows – and are likely to extend these workflow engines to become more general purpose as time goes on.

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