Egenera Cuts Big Blade Deal

Egenera Inc. has enlisted Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC) as exclusive reseller of its BladeFrame servers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (see FSC, Egenera Sign Deal).

The three-year agreement, announced today, is valued at $300 million by the companies, even though it doesn't cover other regions at this time. Sales start officially October 1, and FSC plans a sizeable ramp-up during the second half of its fiscal year, which ends March 2006.

The news is good for Egenera, which continues to grab partners as it pulls itself to the next level (see Egenera Adds Alliance Partners and Egenera Waits on IPO). "The resources generated by Fujitsu Siemens Computers' multi-year commitment to Egenera will allow us to accelerate strategic investments in our company," said Egenera CEO Bob Dutkowsky in a prepared statement. "This announcement is an inflection point."

Egenera, which has $124 million in funding, also has relationships with Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD), EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), , Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), Novell Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL), Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL), Red Hat Inc. (Nasdaq: RHAT), Reuters, SAP AG (NYSE/Frankfurt: SAP), and Sybase Inc.

For its part, FSC hopes the deal will trigger more purchases from customers that buy big. "This is not a volume proposition -- it's a value proposition," says FSC CTO Joseph Reger, noting that the company's goal is to use Egenera's BladeFrame to expand its utility computing strategy to unify server, networking, and storage resources for companies with big computing needs (and pocketbooks) that also want lots of flexibility.Egenera's BladeFrame will become part of FSC's Primergy server line, and work has begun on adding BladeFrame to the Primergy ServerView management system, though there's no delivery date set. Meanwhile, BladeFrame won't displace FSC's other blade servers, the Primergy BX300 and BX600, Reger says.

Still, Reger thinks Egenera's BladeFrame does a better job of utility computing than its existing blade servers. He says the BX300 and BX600 are aimed at users that mainly want to put their Web and application servers in blade form, without the need for fancy-pants virtualization, dynamic reconfiguration, load balancing, policy-making, and so forth.

"[Egenera's blades] are simpler than our blades. There is no storage, networking, or I/O," he says. "The blades don't have a life of their own." In contrast, FSC's Primergy BXs do house these features and functions.

Reger thinks there's still a place, however nichey, for FSC's BXs in utility computing. A software package for the BX300 and BX600 called FlexFrame for mySAP Business Suite virtualizes storage, network, and server functions for users of the database from SAP. When it comes to selling the BX300 and BX600 to big enterprises, SAP's the ball FSC will keep its eye on.

Today's news shows ongoing interest in utility computing among big enterprise customers, such as service providers looking to expand managed service offerings. Indeed, FSC says a first customer for the FSC/Egenera solution will be , which provides managed IT services internationally. Savvis, which couldn't be reached at press time to verify the relationship, is already an Egenera customer, but its interest in the FSC arrangement could indicate willingness to buy more from FSC in EMEA.Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch