HP has acquired IT Automation company Opsware for $1.6 billion.
Whilst any acquisition of this size is interesting in itself, the back story to Opsware is even more so; Opsware was originally LoudCloud, a Web 1.0 company that took $350 million in funding during the Web 1.0 boom. Marc Andreessen explains the story:
In September 1999, at the height of the dot com boom, a small group of colleagues and I started a new company, Loudcloud, based on the idea that the huge Internet infrastructure buildout then underway — by startups and big companies alike — required a new approach to running modern datacenters and computer systems at high scale: automation.
Loudcloud took off like a rocketship, raised $350 million in equity and debt financing, went public in March 2001, and was rapidly nearing $100 million in annual recurring managed services revenue when the entire market blew up and virtually all of our competitors and peers went bankrupt.
In September 2002, we did a complete restart as a public company — we sold our managed services business to EDS and turned Loudcloud into Opsware, a software company based on the core intellectual property developed at Loudcloud. Over the next five years, we executed on our original vision — automation of large-scale modern datacenters and computer systems — within this new model, and built a comprehensive family of state-of-the-art automation software products that power the full range of technologies you find in a modern datacenter, from servers and applications to networking and storage.
Opsware clients include Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Home Depot, GE, Microsoft, Samsung, Comcast, Tivo, and the US Department of Defense. The Sunnyvale based company has 550 employees and $100million in annual revenue.
this is gay
i always thought that it was operating systems and electricity that “power the full range of technologies you find in a modern datacenter, from servers and applications to networking and storage”, not automation software.
Andreessen is the man!!
that’s a great multiple, 1.65bn on 100m in revenues, which aren’t growing at warp speed. lots of synergies, but still, nice multiple for andreessen.
also, not sure how “web 1.0″ this is considering it really isn’t “web” at all. Net, yes. Web, no.
Good for them!!
Not sure whether this is good or not. I like some things about HP, but not a lot of others. For example, their website. Not the best. Their hardware - good, but too often there are incompatabilities even between generations - e.g. G4 and G5. Dell’s is much more stable.
what on earth does it mean in the context of this kind of company to say it is a “web 1.0″ company?
Is a tech company “web 1.0″ because it doesn’t base its business model on ajax and widgets and adsense revenue?
Mike must have said it’s 1.0 because, the old Loudcloud started during the boom days of first phase of web.
LinkedIn doesn’t have ajax [most probably] but it’s still web2.0
Other sites are reporting Andreessen walked with $138M, truth?
Expect more moves with this kind of stuff. The datacenter is a hot topic at the moment because all the “Web 2.0″ applications tax servers and servers are expensive to buy, maintain, have to be kept cool, etc. I hear that a site like MySpace uses over 80 of them to power its site. I think they’re $6k a piece just for the hardware, excluding the manual cost of labor to configure and maintain them. I know lots of big players are looking to other alternative datacenter solutions, that’s for sure.
Not surprised to see HP make this move, since I believe they’re on the hardware side of the business.
I had a hard time understanding the part where the raised $350 million to create a $100 million per year company. That just seems lob-sided.