ATLANTA, January 12, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Stonebranch, Inc. and OpsWise Software today announced that they have signed a definitive agreement to merge. The combined company offers the most modern and advanced workload automation solutions available on the market today.

"Today marks a new era in Workload Automation. The joining of OpsWise and Stonebranch's solutions and vision will prove to enhance data center automation around the world," noted Wolfgang Bothe, Stonebranch's President and CEO. "In merging with OpsWise, we will expand our Indesca capabilities to include the most modern Job Scheduler available on the market today, allowing our customers to take advantage of current technologies and to address the complex needs of today's data center. In OpsWise, we found a true partner. Together, we aim to revitalize Workload Automation, providing better alternatives for our customers and the industry."

"Job scheduling is evolving to a more dynamic market, from one that had been considered mature (in which all problems had been solved, and the choices had been consolidated into a handful of dominant vendors) just a few years ago," reports Milind Govekar, research vice president, Gartner Inc. in the Magic Quadrant for Job Scheduling, 2009, April 28, 2009.

OpsWise Software is an industry recognized provider of sophisticated and modern workload automation solutions. Their core product, Automation Center, is one of the most comprehensive and easy-to-use job scheduling solutions for environments that span from z/OS to distributed systems and even to cloud-based solutions.

Stonebranch's innovative Workload Automation solutions include independent job scheduling agents that enable total cross-platform integration and interoperability of disparate scheduling environments. Stonebranch also offers a suite of Managed File Transfer products that inter-operate with existing Job Scheduling and Workload Automation tools.

Jim Sievers, CEO of OpsWise, said "Our Automation Center technology provides a viable alternative to existing solutions, and at a fraction of what they pay for solutions from typical legacy vendors. Combining that with Stonebranch's Independent Scheduling Agent technology results in one powerful solution to offer the marketplace."

The new entity will reside under the Stonebranch name and brand and will be headquartered out of Stonebranch's existing headquarters in Atlanta, GA, USA. Stonebranch founders Wolfgang Bothe, Chairman & CEO, and Nathan Hammond, CTO, will remain in their respective roles while COO John Mecke will continue to lead day-to-day operations of the business. All existing OpsWise employees will join the new organization including Jim Sievers, OpsWise's CEO, who will become the company's new Chief Architect & VP of Engineering and Gwyn Clay, OpsWise's VP of Product Management & Marketing, who will take on the same role within the new company.

"The merger with OpsWise will enable us to invest more resources in our Indesca and Infitran products. We remain steadfastly committed to the development, expansion, and quality of our core products," said John Mecke, Stonebranch's COO. "Our goal is to seamlessly integrate Automation Center with our existing technologies. Over the next year, the OpsWise technology will be merged into Stonebranch's solutions, and those customers wishing to take advantage of OpsWise Automation Center will simply be able to set a configuration option to enable agents to interact with OpsWise."

For more information on the merger, please visit http://www.stonebranch.com/merger.