Why did Egenera acquire Fort Technologies?

Pete Manca; Chairman, CEO, and President of Egenera, spent a short time discussing the recent acquisition of Fort Technologies. Here's a short summary of that discussion.

• Egenera is a long time supplier of tools that help organizations use their industry standard (X86-based) infrastructure as a set of reliable services. It was one of the earliest suppliers of blade computers.
• Egenera's PAN Manager, has evolved over time to offer intelligent workload optimization and management of systems, networks and storage. PAN Manager improves workload availability, reliability and aids in an organizations disaster recovery planning.
• Egenera's PAN Domain Manager builds upon PAN Manager and makes it possible for groups of systems to be harnessed together in a way that extends the scalability of the optimized computing environment while also simplifying management of systems, workloads and storage.
• Egenera's recently announced PAN Cloud Director extends this into a complete private cloud environment by adding self service management, service catalogs, workload management and even a cost chargeback system.
• Fort Technologies cloud lifecycle management technology was used in the creation of PAN Cloud Director and is part of the reason the product has been well received by customers.
• Customers enjoy the freedom to build private cloud environments using their choice of systems, storage and networking components. These systems become part of a highly available, highly reliable, scaleable and yet very manageable private cloud environment.
• Egenera's management believed that combining the engineering teams, resources and management would shorten the product development cycle and allow better, more integrated products to be brought to market.

Snapshot Analysis

Egenera has taken many steps away from its beginnings as one of the first blade computer suppliers. One of the most important moves was to free its PAN Manager from its very tight integration with Egenera's own hardware and allow it to be deployed on systems offered by many different suppliers.

In Egenera's words: "Egenera maintains over 50 partnerships with the world’s leading technology companies including Citrix, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu Technology Solutions, HP, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP and VMware. Egenera flagship product, PAN Manager, is certified on major blades platforms, including IBM, HP, Fujitsu, NEC and Dell."

I walked away with the belief that the acquisition made sense for Egenera, its customers and its partners.