The Egenera kit has the capability to be sold as a mainframe made of x86 CPUs, but for some reason t's not. Egenera has two problems in the UK - they have always been pitched against straight blades like the HP and IBM kit, which is simply better at the straight blades tasks, and usually cheaper too, when they really should have been pitched against kit like the Unisys and Stratus systems; and they signed an exclusive reselling partnership with FSC, which meant they reduced their possible market in a flash and left themselves at the mercy of FSC salesgrunts more interested in pushing FSC's own straight blades, Xeon servers and SPARC64 kit. If Fujitsu marketed the Egenera frames as mini mainframes at a tenth of a mainframe's cost they'd be on a winner, capable of knocking out many older IBM mainframes and many Unisys server farms.

On the Sun front, I'd wait for them to get a bit more desperate and then buy up their patents at a knock-down price. Other than patents, Sun has nothing of interest to offer.

..With you on SUN. They are getting desperate, but could still bicker like a Yahoo! if you propose an offer. I think Sun would be naive to not look at a buyout situation. However, I thought the same about Yahoo!, and well, the fact the didn't take it doesn't make me wrong as much as it makes them stupid. They better hope this Apple Mobile platform thing they are panning out works...

As for Egenera, I'm not as rehearsed on there tech. However, had being in IT sales, I can tell you when you call someone up on a blade server sale and pitch it as a "Mini Mainframe" your immediate response will be "But how does it compare to HP or IBM blades" Because Techies will look at it for what it basically is, and its basically a blade. Thats probably why they focus on selling it that way, because thats how the customer will perceive it. Since they have already introduced "Blade" into the sales language, thats going to be tough term to get away from.

Marketing makes you or breaks you, NOT your sales guys. Good companies don't need sales guys, if they have the perfect product. (Thats just one guys opinion as a former, Horrible, sales guy)

BladeFrame does not compete (and nor should it) in the blade space. Its real benefit is in removing complex software stacks to manage service quality and service levels, both in the Win/Lintel world as well as he expensive proprietory UNIX worlds. Takre a look at how many software stacks you need to manage a cClass effectively (its on the HP website under data centre automation) all that software, all that complexity, so little time.....................

BladeFrame replaces all of this with one box, one stack, one interface, and BTW it manages physical and virtual in the same way.

Hmmmmmmmmmm.. sounds like a Mainframe to me, heard that somewhere before............?