Veritas Acquires Invio, Plans To Integrate Process Automation Into Utility Computing

Technology from Invio, a privately held, Los Altos, Calif.-based developer of IT process automation technology, is already a part of Veritas' utility computing offering, and will play an increasingly important role going forward, said Jeff Hausman, director or product marketing for automation products at Veritas.

Invio's process automation engine has been embedded in Veritas' CommandCentral Service 4.0, which the company released last week, said Hausman.

As a small company with limited resources, Invio focused development of its process automation technology on active practices for storage provisioning and management, Hausman said. However, he said the technology is extensible to other areas. Veritas' roadmap for the technology includes integrating it into server provisioning and management as well as cluster provisioning and management in the near future. The next step will be to make templates that can be customized by customers or solution providers specifically for their particular needs or best practices, he said.

Sometime next year, Veritas plans to bring out new capabilities to tie together application performance tools with automated processing for other elements in Veritas' software stack, said Hausman.

Hausman used the example of an automated help desk to illustrate the potential of process automation to explain how the Invio technology might work. "To provision a new database, you need server resources, storage resources, cluster resources, and data backup capabilities," he said. "So if the help desk gets a call for a new database, it can use Invio to automatically trigger a request for these resources."

Michael Fanelli, western regional manager for SSI hubcity, a Metuchen, N.J.-based solution provider, said that any time Veritas can acquire more technology to make its product line a "do-anything-for-you suite" will help advance the company's utility computing plans.

Unlike many other vendors, said Fanelli, Veritas has shown the ability to integrate new technologies quickly into its products.

"Everyone touts ILM [information lifecycle management], DLM [data lifecycle management], all these things, and say they can do it all," he said. "No one can do it all. But Veritas has been doing a better job than anyone else in integrating all their different acquisitions into a single offering."

Invio is Veritas' fourth utility computing acquisition in 19 months. The company previously acquired Precise Software, whose i3 technology monitors application performance, and Jareva Technologies, whose OpForce technology automates server deployment. In January, it acquired Ejasent, a Mountain View, Calif.-based developer of software that allows applications to be moved from server to server without disruption.