Q&A: Todd DeLaughter explains his move from HP to Opalis

Computerworld - Todd DeLaughter became president and CEO of Opalis Software Inc. in Toronto in mid-October after serving as vice president and general manager of Hewlett-Packard Co.'s OpenView business unit, with annual revenues of $1 billion. In a recent interview, he talked about his departure after HP's purchase of Mercury Interactive Corp. for $4.5 billion, as well as Opalis' role as a maker of software for automating IT operational processes.

Excerpt from that interview follow:

How did your move from HP to Opalis go? At HP, we had kind of fulfilled our vision to bring in a core set of capabilities and to stop losing money in the unit. That was accomplished just as the Mercury acquisition was taking place and HP's Tom Hogan [the senior vice president of HP software] merged those two teams and eliminated the GMs over OpenView and Mercury. For the size of the acquisitions, that was the right answer, to get everybody on one page. I very much supported what HP did. I knew Opalis has this hot new category of software called Run Book Automation that automates across distributed systems. Opalis has an out-of-the-box way to link systems together in friendly way, and that's the main driver for me. So I left HP Oct. 6, and started at Opalis Oct. 16.

Why Opalis? I looked at where the trends were and where I thought we were moving. The management software industry does a good job today of providing tools to report IT events as they happen, to monitor activity and tell what's wrong. And to some degree, the software can tie into service levels. What we do a fairly poor job of is automating responses to outages. I saw in Opalis a vision of responding to IT events. And Opalis was doing it in a policy-based way, meaning customers can be flexible with the software. That's powerful.

We were recently at a Gartner Data Center conference where a major issue was around being more responsive to changes. Things are as not as automated as they could be. Say that for any single management vendor or customer environment. Nobody is a single source, and automation has lots of room for improvement. Second, there are still increasing operational costs. They are all people-related costs. The ability to take human management out of IT events is critical for businesses going forward, and to get that money over to the line of business needs.

Opalis has three things. The ability to orchestrate a series of process steps, integrate all management tools involved in process flow and automate actions to allow for a closed loop around IT Infrastructure Library processes or incident management. Based on the nature of events, that means having five or six different systems in an average system and the orchestration of different systems is nearly impossible.