Optinuity's new Oasis product takes a bit of a different approach to IT process automation. While many of the run book automation vendors focus on the integration of other platforms and automation of process, Oasis combines elements of IT automation, monitoring, and policy management into a single software solution.

What may be most interesting for customers is its concept of "Autonomic Policy Management." Vendors like IBM are working to include autonomic capabilities within their existing products. For many products, however, there are manual events that occur within applications that haven't yet been automated.

With Oasis, you can connect to applications and automate processes within the application and reduce the need to integrate to other applications (outside of Oasis).

An example in one of their customers is user lock-outs that typically require a call to the help desk for the account to be manually reset. In this example, they established a policy that would allow automatic account release if certain conditions were met. While some applications have this capability natively, many do not. For those cases, Oasis may be the answer.

Event monitoring may allow them to become more proactive and less reactive. We hope to get Oasis into our labs in the near future so we can see how well it compares to the other offerings in this market such as BMC's RunBook, HP/Opsware Policy Automation System, Opalis, NetIQ Aegis, and Stratavia.