With HP, Egenera Poised For Explosive Growth

Not so long ago, Engera, a developer of an open converged infrastructure and unified computing solution, was considered at best a marginal player with an "opportunity to become less irrelevant." Fast forward to February, and the company reported its best financial year on record, with software orders doubling quarter over quarter. Its software sales were up 200 percent year over year, with the average PAN (Processing Area Network) Manager order size doubling during that time frame.

The company's value proposition primarily involves the elimination of a lot of over-provisioning. It says that its customers typically see a 56 percent reduction in capex and opex over three years, as well as an 85 percent reduction in complexity.

With its latest announcement, Egenera is more than quadrupling the total available market, with expectations that the availability of PAN Manager Software on HP BladeSystem C-class Intel-based server blades will provide similar growth opportunities. The company says that its existing platforms, Dell and Fujitsu, gave it access to 15 percent of the server market, but the addition of HP will take that up to 70 percent.

Now shipping, the Egenera PAN Manager for HP BladeSystem with the Virtual Connect FlexFabric module will give customers greater agility and scale for server operations while reducing complexity, risk and costs. The company says the new release will offer a tenfold increase in throughput for PAN Manager Software environments. Its software uses standard servers and Ethernet, and creates server, I/O, networking and storage pools that can be easily reallocated, combining the simplification benefits of unified computing with integrated high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) services for physical and virtual servers.

A 400 percent increase in TAM is significant, but it all comes down to the execution, says Jed Scaramella, research manager, enterprise servers, IDC. "They're really driving the PAN management software. They used to be hardware and software, ... but that can be a pretty tough business to compete against other people's hardware. Taking a hardware-agnostic approach, I think, is very good."But Egenera is the one selling the new solution, not HP. "HP sees it as an incremental bonus to them, with relatively no effort on their part." Currently, Egenera has about 400 customers and 1,600 sites, and sells through a mixture of direct and indirect channels. Still, Scaramella thinks this is a sophisticated combined solution for markets requiring enterprise-class high-performance, HA and DR for business-critical applications, and that it should be well-received.

Egenera says it won't be stopping with HP, and will add other vendor platforms. While the company wouldn't indicate which platforms, Scaramella says the next big one would be IBM. "If you're agnostic, you want to have as many partners as you can, and IBM is the second leading vendor in blades."

Overall, he likes the strategy of focusing more on the software side of the solution. "PAN Manager is really good at making sure that the apps are always up, ... [and that's] what private cloud is really solving."

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