Kurt Shintaku's Blog

I wanted to make sure you were aware of upcoming System Center product and licensing changes as you may want to take advantage of today’s pricing on some of your planned projects. 

In December 2009, Microsoft acquired Opalis, an industry leader in I.T. Process Automation or “Run Book Automation” software.  Opalis software provides new ways to help reduce costs, improve IT efficiency, and free up resources. This can be achieved by replacing manual, resource-intensive and error prone activities with standardized, automated processes.  Together, Opalis and System Center enables IT leaders to deliver a truly dynamic datacenter by integrating data center tools and automating, orchestrating IT processes across them. Dow Chemical achieved a 30% reduction on operational costs and reduced actionable alarms by 66% and response times dropped from 17 minutes to less than 3 minutes per alert. Watch the video case study.

These powerful automation capabilities are available to System Center server management suite customers via a grant from the Opalis subsidiary, at no additional cost until August 1*, 2010.  Customers who purchase or have purchased System Center server management suites (SMSE/SMSD) will be granted licenses for Opalis capabilities along with our emerging Service desk, CMDB capabilities (“Service Manager”) for the servers they are managing.  There are no additional license fees until August 1, 2010. However, the price of our server management suites will increase on August 1, 2010 so take advantage of the cost savings now before this pricing change occurs. The estimates for this increase are around 30% for SMSE and 70% for SMSD licenses.

As you might already know, the SMSE and SMSD suite provide a simple, flexible and economical way to license both physical and virtual server infrastructures to be managed by the four main System Center components (System Center Server Management Suites FAQ). Those components include:

• System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2
• System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2
• System Center Data Protection Manager 2007
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2
• System Center Server Manager (New to SMSE & SMSD)
• Opalis (New to SMSE & SMSD)

We’re excited about these new components in the System Center server management suites and wanted to communicate the upcoming changes so you can take advantage now.  We would be glad to demonstrate these new capabilities for your team and help you evaluate the benefits.