As a former Egenera sales engineer, customer and VAR – I continue to be one of Egenera’s biggest fans and feel uniquely qualified (and compelled) to provide a few comments here.

No doubt one of the true innovators in their space over the last decade – the gurus in Marlboro remain front runners in the Data Center Virtualization business. Recent new product announcements by the likes of Cisco, who have wisely adopted your approach will no doubt enjoy a great deal of success. Nay sayer competitors who fail to follow your lead will continue to peddle more of the same with slightly different widow dressing on each subsequent release in a feign attempt to disguise their lack of ingenuity (and place emphasis on their only true goal – to saturate the market with more of the same inferior products to drive revenue)!

The PAN Manager, along with the high-speed ATM fabric and an adaptive, evolving ensemble of affordably priced AMD and Intel based blades comprise perhaps the most significant virtual/blade computing platform to emerge to date – and thus far remains peerless. No other platform really comes close to offering the level of pure agility, flexibility, scalability and reliability that comes stock with a BladeFrame EX or ES system – period. Egenera’s ability to drive down costs and complexity with a fundemental step change approach to utility computing has and remains an industry differentiator.

There has been a great deal of discussion and various interpretations of the “cloud computing” approach. Most will agree that it is essentially a collection of anonymous, commodity-based hardware components that are managed, much like a puppet on a string by elegant software APIs and management “dashboards” that seek to demystify, popularize (and commoditize) the physical to virtual transition of mainstream computer users. This “new” cloud computing approach, industry experts contend is a true “game changer” in terms of leveraging virtualization to take SAAS and other agile application environments to new heights.

What these so called experts fail to mention is that the “game changing” technology they speak of was actually introduced by Egenera in 2001 – PAN Manager! But, as the saying goes – “no good deed goes unpunished” and because the paradigm that you introduced back then was so conceptually vague for most – many opted to ignore or dismiss it.

Subsequent bloggers may few my commentary as biased but I contend that it is merely a truthful statement. As an admirer of true innovation in the technology field I’m thankful for my early introduction to your product (2003). I’m hopeful for you that the light bulb will illuminate for others who also appreciate a true game changer and will discover the value proposition that Egenera has offered for nearly ten years. Many thanks, much respect and best of luck to the entire team in Marlboro!