HP agreed to purchase datacentre automation vendor Opsware last week, in a $1.6bn (£780m) deal that it said would enhance its portfolio of business technology optimisation (BTO) software.

HP Software’s senior vice-president, Tom Hogan, said that the Opsware purchase would help HP offer its customers a simplified datacentre management experience.

“The market place and the customer is experiencing an explosion in complexity. The number of server farms doubles every five years, and 80 percent of incidents, failures and downtime [can be attributed to management problems arising from] the dynamic nature of mobile devices, storage and servers,” Hogan explained.

Opsware chief executive Ben Horowitz, who will lead HP’s BTO organisation, agreed that datacentres and IT infrastructure were becoming increasingly complex to manage. “In 1995, 500,000 servers were shipped. If you fast forward to last year, seven million servers were shipped, a 14-fold increase in 10 years. As a result of this, labour costs have gone up six times and this has created a huge need for a system to run a modern datacentre,” he said.

HP has made a number of acquisitions over the past three years, but Hogan said that there would be very little overlap in its services, even after the Opsware purchase. “That’s one of the key things to consider in a deal, and it drives the premium and the price. Just as with the Mercury acquisition, where we had very little overlap to rationalise, that’s the case with Opsware,” he added.

Mary Turner of analyst Ovum said the deal was a good move for HP. “The Opsware acquisition fills two critical holes in the HP Software BTO portfolio. The first is an obvious capabilities gap, for example policy-based datacentre and network change, configuration, provisioning and compliance management automation,” she explained. “Secondly, Ben Horowitz brings a wealth of experience driving rapid growth of internet-age products, including stints at Netscape and AOL prior to helping to found Opsware.”

Meanwhile, at the Networkers at Cisco Live 2007 event in the US last week, Cisco unveiled its Data Center 3.0 vision for the next generation of datacentres.

To kick start its push into large datacentres relying heavily on virtualised services, Cisco announced new hardware, software and services, as well as a restructuring of its channel partnerships.

The major product announcement was VFrame Data Center (VFrame DC), a new management tool that uses the “intelligence” embedded in its network infrastructure to provision computing, network and storage resources together to create virtualised services.

“Over the next 12 to 24 months, you’ll see more products coming out that enable IT managers to automate and work in this virtualised large datacentre area,” said Cisco datacentre consulting systems architect, Ian Bond. “We need to give them the ability to manage these virtualised environments reasonably simply, as well as being able to integrate with server, storage and other management software from vendors like CA, HP, IBM and BMC."