Charmed by own tune, Egenera sells PAN to rivals

More virtualization, less cloven hooves

By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View • Get more from this author

Posted in Virtualization, 29th October 2007 21:57 GMT

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Egenera has confirmed that it plans to create a separate software business by reselling its server management code.

We've long heard rumors that Egenera planned to go this route, and the move makes sense. Customers seem impressed with the blade server specialist's PAN Manager product, so why keep it locked away on Egenera's hardware. The time for proprietary, appliance-style hardware companies has passed, right?

Those of you who've watched the blade server game for a long time will be intimately familiar with Egenera. It arrived on the scene just after fellow blade pioneer RLX Technologies. (RLX eventually dropped its blade server hardware line to focus on selling code only. It then sold that software business to HP, and we hear HP killed off the Control Tower software a few weeks ago.)

Egenera was more or less created by the financial community for the financial community. Some techies with Wall Street backgrounds convinced their chums to fund the firm, and Egenera then proceeded to sell its initial gear to Wall Street firms. It's good work if you can conjure it.

More recently, Egenera has turned into a blade server/virtualization fancy pants by mixing its tight hardware with sophisticated code.

The PAN Manager software sits on top of hypervisors from the likes of VMware and XenSource/Citrix and handles more complex tasks. It'll provision physical and virtual servers, networking gear and storage systems. It also controls disaster recovery and high availability functions and has tools for charge-back and extra secure partitions

Quite a few start-ups out there claim to ship similar software. So, Egenera has figured out that it can compete against these youngsters by selling its mature code to hardware rivals.

Exactly how much will it sell the code for and who is buying it? Er, good questions.

Egenera refuses to reveal such precious details at this time, preferring just to tease. But, we're told that a customer and some pricing will be revealed in about one week.

How will we survive the wait? ®

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