HP buys Opsware for more than $1.6 billion in cash

Ben Horowitz, CEO of Opsware second from right and associates
Today Marc Anderson announced that Opsware is being acquired by Hewlett-Packard for more than $1.6 billion in cash, or $14.25 per share. Co-founder of “œbuild your own“ social networking service Ning and one of the internets oldest names, Netscape.
Read his detailed blog entry here

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.
The eight years that have followed have been an unbelievable journey.
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.

[Via: Mashable]