Yesterday, Hewlett-Packard announced its intent to acquire Opsware for more than $1.6 billion. The big winner in this deal is Marc Andreessen, better known for his success with Netscape. At HP’s offer price, Andreesen stands to gain $138 million after the acquisition.

Marc even wrote an article on his blog the day the acquisition was announced. Here is an excerpt:

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.

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.

All Marc needs to do now is sell his other venture, Ning.com, and he’ll have a hat trick. For those of you not familiar with hockey, a hat trick is the term used when a player scores three goals in the same game.

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