Opalis Software is bringing greater IT process automation capabilities to Microsoft’s suite of system management software.

At the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas April 28, Opalis officials announced that their offerings for Microsoft System Center touch on such key data center areas as virtualization, cloud computing and power management capabilities.

The offerings will give System Center users greater ability to orchestrate the technologies within Microsoft’s software suite and automate the best practices for the management of their infrastructures.

Yale Tankus, senior vice president of marketing and business development for Opalis, said customers are demanding greater orchestration capabilities in both their physical and virtual environments, and that Opalis’ offerings within System Center will enable them to more quickly ramp up their virtualization and cloud computing efforts.

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For Microsoft, it gives the company some more capabilities in its ongoing attempt to gain leverage over VMware in the highly competitive virtualization space, Tankus said in an e-mail. For example, virtualization capabilities Opalis is bringing to Microsoft’s software suite include virtual lifecycle management, including self-serve provisioning, backup, restore and power management. Opalis’ solution—Virtual Service Management—will sit behind Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager, he said.

“So Microsoft is no longer behind VMware in this space,” said Tankus, adding that Opalis is demonstrating the prototype at the Microsoft show.

In the area of cloud computing, Opalis enables System Center users to move resources between private and public cloud environments, and to scale capacity up or down depending on events. They also can automatically failover to cloud resources, which ensure no interruption to services.

The Opalis offerings also integrate with the System Center Operations Manager console and provide users with a rich set of ITIL (information technology infrastructure libraries) policies to find and fix problems. Throughout the process of dealing with an incident, the System Center Operations Manager alert is updated, which gives users greater visibility into the situation and how to deal with it.

The Opalis offerings for System Center will be generally available in the third quarter.