H-P Agrees to Acquire Opsware for $1.45 Billion - WSJ.com

 Looks like MarcA will have more time for blogging (see his post "HP buys my company Opsware for more than $1.6 billion in cash")...

Hewlett-Packard Inc. agreed to acquire software maker Opsware Inc. for $1.45 billion as the PC giant continues to bulk up its non-hardware offerings.

H-P will pay $14.25 for each shares of Opsware, a 39% premium to Friday's closing price of $10.28. Including debt, the deal is valued at about $1.6 billion.

[...]

Opsware was co-founded by Marc Andreessen, the young brain behind Internet pioneer Netscape Communications Corp. The company has painfully built itself into a credible enterprise-software business after focusing on Internet "hosting" and related services during its first three years in existence. When that business went south, Messrs. Andreessen and Horowitz laid off hundreds of employees and retooled the company's business. Mr. Horowitz will become part of H-P's management.

Excerpt from blog.pmarca.com link above:

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.

We have become the clear market leader, and today our software is in use at more than 350 of the largest and most advanced businesses and government agencies, including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Home Depot, GE, Microsoft, Samsung, Comcast, Tivo, and the US Department of Defense. Along the way, Opsware has grown to more than $100 million in annual revenue and 550 employees, and has become one of the fastest-growing software companies in the world.

H-P Agrees to Acquire Opsware for $1.45 Billion - WSJ.com