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Wow, everyone is talking, blogging, writing about Cisco's potential entry in to the server market. Cisco's CTO blogged about it recently, and while there are no specifics, she certainly made it clear that Cisco will enter new markets and compete with current partners. James Staten of Forrester took a stab at defining what the new product might look like. Guess what? It looks like a PAN. Processing blades, Unified fabrics, Virtualization, and Infrastructure management... Sounds pretty familiar. It's great to see a company like Cisco validate the architecture that we invented almost 9 years ago. Our customers have been reaping the benefits of this type of solution since we installed our first production systems in 2001. It really is the right architecture for the Dynamic Data Center, and as I've blogged many times before, the combination of converged fabrics, commodity processing, and virtualization is extremely compelling, especially in a world where Cloud Computing and other Real Time Infrastructures are gaining traction. However, what I see happening in the market is the formation of proprietary RTI management stacks and a land grab for to be the manager of the Dynamic Data Center. Cisco will announce their offering; HP has taken their proprietary Unix offering - VSE, and brought it to the x86 platform, though still in a propritary way. Same with IBM and others. All of these offerings require <inserve vendor name>  hardware to be part of the solution. It's ironic, but Egenera is the only heterogeneous solution on the market. It's ironic because we're often pegged as "proprietary" by the other guys, but in fact, PAN Manager runs across multiple hardware platforms. This is significant because the winner in this market will be the vendor who can manage a heterogeneous environment.