Egnera continues to do well

http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bns102907-story01.html

Egenera has been a pioneer in the areas of blade server design and server virtualization and systems management since it was founded seven years ago. Up until now, if you wanted to use Egenera’s PAN Manager virtualization management tools, you had to buy Egenera’s BladeFrame platform. But soon, that will change. Egenera announced today that it will be making its future PAN Manager Release 6 software available to OEMs so they can license it and sell it for their own server, storage, and peripherals.

I know what many of you are thinking. Another blade server pioneer, RLX Technologies, delivered the first commercial blade servers to the market in 2001, way ahead of the whole power and cooling issue than many server vendors since it chose the low-power Transmeta X86 processors for its blades. But even after expanding to more powerful X86 processors, by the end of 2004, RLX hired a new chief executive officer with deep experience in the software business, and then soon announced it was killing its hardware business. And it was only a few months later that RLX’s Control Tower software disappeared in an asset acquisition inside of Hewlett-Packard to be heard of again only as a set of management tools that HP deployed on its BladeSystem machines running Linux.

This is not how the Egenera story is going to go, says Mike Thompson, the president and chief executive officer at the company. Egenera has no plans of abandoning its BladeFrame hardware business–not in the slightest. And for good reason. According to Thompson, in 2006, Egenera’s sales rose by in excess of 30 percent to above $100 million. (Egenera is a privately held company with backing from venture capitalists, and has not yet gone public so the company does not provide any more specific details on its sales.) As for 2007, Egenera is adding between 20 and 30 new accounts each quarter, and it could do substantially better than that in the fourth quarter, helped in part though an OEM agreement that has Fujitsu-Siemens peddling BladeFrames in the EMEA market. So breaking PAN Manager loose from BladeFrame sales is not about not having a healthy, profitable, and growing server business.

Very cool, it will be interesting to see how Egenera does in the near future, by licensing its software available to OEMs, the company can get exposure in terms of blade and system management, giving it two or more potential revenue streams, very cool. Let’s not forget as you start scaling up your infrastructure, reaching the hundreds or thousands of servers, the issue is not so much component failures, it’s system management, deployments, asset/inventory management, patch revisions and everything else.