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 nort ...

, 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 board ...

, 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 activities o ...

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 an ...

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 muni ...

, 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. HP Inc. is an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, that develops personal computers (PCs), printers and related supplies, as well as 3D printing solutions. It was formed on November ...

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 H ...

(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 Silicon ...

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 Tim Howes (born September 21, 1963) is a software engineer, entrepreneur and author. He is the co-creator of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), the Internet standard for accessing directory servers. He co-founded enterprise soft ...

, 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 con ...

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 Fra ...

'', 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 mul ...

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 Totality Corporation was a venture-backed professional services and managed services provider based out of San Francisco, from the years 1999 to 2005. The senior management team and founders were primarily executives from EDS, Fort Point Partners ...

(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

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

solutions as part of the

HP Software Division Micro Focus International plc is a British multinational corporation, multinational software industry, software and information technology business based in Newbury, Berkshire, England. The firm provides software and consultant, consultancy. T ...

. 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 ...

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 serv ...

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 ot ...

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, which ...

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 corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develo ...

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 corporation, multinational information technology (IT) services and consulting company headquartered in Ashburn, Virginia. History DXC Technology was founded on April 3, 2017 when the Hewlett Packar ...

), 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 that ranks 500 of the largest United States corporations by total revenue for their respective fiscal years. The list includes publicly held companies, along ...

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