BMC today signed a definitive agreement to acquire BladeLogic for $800 million, or $28 per share. Although BMC denies it, it is essentially their answer to HP’s acquisition of Opsware, in that it adds server and application provisioning to BMC’s portfolio.

Replacing a piece of technology that it formerly OEM’ed from elsewhere, SAS announced it has bought Teragram, a provider of text processing tools. The 40-person, Cambridge, MA-based company, provides natural language analytic tools that include the text categorization tools that SAS has lacked. Under the deal, it will be run as an autonomous business of SAS.

When HP acquired Opsware last summer, one of our first questions was when they would get around to applying the IT Process Automation (a.k.a., Run Book Automation) technology to what had previously been the core of their monitoring and service desk offerings.

Roughly six months after the acquisition, HP let the other shoe drop, with the first half dozen or so process workflow templates. Specifically, HP is providing pre-built workflow templates around incident management, change management, and validating with the CMDB to update configuration items that are associated with a specific business service when the health of the given service is checked out.

Zend is releasing the next major version of the Zend Framework, with the new 1.5 version literally filling in a number of blanks, starting with forms. According to CTO and co-founder Andi Gutmans, prosaic features such as incorporating the plumbing for forms filling and processing, plus publishing more educational and best practices content, led the wish lists of developers attending Zend’s first major user conference last fall.