Opalis Awarded IT Process Automation "All-Star First Team" Ranking by Enterprise Management Associates

Business Wire, Feb 26, 2008

Leading Industry Analyst Firm Recognizes Opalis as 'Best of the Best' for Innovation, Customer Success, and Functional Solutions

TORONTO -- Opalis Software Inc., the market leader in IT process automation software, today announced that IT industry analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has named Opalis to its "All-Star First Team" in the category of IT Process Automation in The EMA All-Stars in Enterprise Systems Management for 2008 research report. "All-Star First Team," as defined by EMA, is a special honor award that refers to the "best of the best."

The All-Star awards are designed to recognize what EMA considers to be the best available software solutions within a specific discipline. Criteria includes strength of product offering, functionality, and platform support; commitment to product vision and delivering innovation; customer feedback, including satisfaction, and market penetration; and EMA's perspective from independent evaluations of expert analysis. According to the report, "Opalis takes a starting spot on the IT Process Automation (ITPA) All-Star First Team with a mature and detailed product, a strong pattern of development and innovation, and an extremely usable and functional package approach to ITPA."

"This prestigious award from EMA is an honor that reaffirms our value to customers, and recognizes our commitment to providing best-of-breed solutions for IT process automation," said George Kellar, COO at Opalis. "With proven customer successes worldwide, we know automation is crucial for IT organizations that want to deliver services faster, with fewer errors, throughout the data center and across the enterprise. Being ranked by EMA as the 'best of the best' is another acknowledgement of Opalis' leadership and ability to provide IT process automation solutions that result in more agility and lower costs for our customers."

Opalis delivers unique solutions that enable IT process automation inside and outside the data center across heterogeneous IT ecosystems. The Opalis solutions are easily implemented and quickly return value. Unlike traditional business services management, data center automation, or IT service automation products from other vendors, Opalis employs a scalable 'enterprise services' architecture to automate processes and workflows for critical IT initiatives, such as virtualization, provisioning, ITIL, disaster recovery, consolidation, and security. Opalis is the leader in seamless integration with systems management tools from vendors including BladeLogic, Microsoft, IBM, VMware, CA, EMC, BMC Software, and HP Software, thereby providing the integration bridge that allows IT management to orchestrate intelligent automation throughout the data center regardless of the complexity and silos in their IT infrastructure.

With Opalis, enterprises can quickly realize the benefits of IT process automation, driving down management costs and increasing productivity, while enforcing compliant best practices aimed at improving performance and availability of critical business applications.

"The automation market place has seen tremendous gains, especially for enterprises that want to keep costs down and improve IT efficiency," said Andi Mann, research director at EMA. "As this past year has shown, IT process automation is crucial for global enterprises that want to be placed on the fast-track to continual development and innovation. With an expanding worldwide enterprise customer base and an effective proven product family, Opalis has solidified their place among the leading independent vendors in the booming IT process automation industry."

About EMA

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is a leading industry analyst and consulting firm dedicated to the IT management market. EMA provide IT vendors and enterprise IT professionals with objective insight into the real-world business value of technologies ranging from Virtualization to Security and Risk Management to ITSM, and CMDB. Learn more about EMA's research, free online IT Management Solutions Center, and IT consulting offerings at: www.enterprisemanagement.com.

About Opalis Software Inc.

Opalis Software Inc., founded in 1999 and headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, is the IT process automation market leader with some of the largest enterprise customers in the world, including Woolworth's, VMware, Toyota, Johnson & Johnson, British Telecom, Bank of New York, and Accenture. Opalis provides a comprehensive IT process automation solution to orchestrate, integrate, and automate IT processes for large and medium enterprises focused on improving service delivery and reducing costs. For more information on Opalis, please visit www.opalis.com.