What do you say to IT folks who worry that automation software displaces jobs? Well, the vice president of IT and the CIO each have different agendas. For those in IT operations, we try to get them out of firefighting mode, that reactive mode to problems. If we can take the reactive nature out of that, that's good. We're not about anything like job displacement or putting people out of work. If we can move a company's investment from firefighting of system problems into new investment area that's our key value proposition....

What is new from Opalis? On Dec. 4, we announced a new set of integration pathways to other systems, namely, BMC Remedy, BMC Atrium, Microsoft Active Directory and Microsoft Service Center Operations and VMWare VirtualCenter 2. Those five are added to Opalis' existing 22 integration packs for enabling IT operations personnel to connect and interact with a variety of heterogeneous systems management tools. There are also 90 pre-built process templates for ITIL-based processes and a new graphical user interface to drag and drop objects

What have you found that Opalis most needs to work on? As Opalis moves from a smaller to larger company, I see it is a product-focused company and a good engineering company making scalable enterprise class software, but less focused on outbound sales and marketing reach and developing partnerships. Our outbound sales force needs to be primed to sell our story. Partnerships will be important for me, and from my OpenView days, I have good connections in the industry. Opalis software could bring value to IBM, HP or Dell where they want to bring automation around how servers get configured in an environment. There's also opportunity to have a relationship with the Big Four management software companies [IBM, HP, BMC Software and CA Inc.]. We provide a complementary set of capabilities. We do actual task automation on the other side of process work flows such as BMC's Remedy. We can also partner with outsourcers such as EDS or Unisys, helping to take costs out of managing a system environment. My effort is for building relationships. Microsoft, Oracle and SAP could also be partners.

Are you living in Toronto yet? I have to move from California to Toronto and somebody has to teach me how to drive in the snow.