Egenera appoints CDG as first disti

CDG has become the first distributor for Egenera, a developer of converged infrastructure management software, in an agreement that will allow the former Fujitsu OEM supplier to establish a two-tier VAR channel structure.
Egenera’s flagship PAN Manager software allows granular control over resources such as compute, storage and network bandwidth for both virtual and physical applications. The software was originally sold as a Fujitsu OEM product and has more than 1,600 installations across the globe, which the firm believes, makes it more prevalent that rival Cisco Vblock.
According to Peter Thomas, a non executive director at CDG, the independent nature of PAN Manager made it attractive addition: “[the rival Cisco product] is proprietary and more expensive and won’t do high availability or disaster recovery in the same way and [PAN] lets partners go into the cloud market with a lower setup cost.”
In terms of recruitment, CDG is aiming at recruiting three top tier partners of which Fujitsu has already signed up. “Around half a dozen” tier two partners such as Kelway and “up to 20” specialist partners, according to Thomas.
The agreement is not exclusive but John Banfield, EMEA channel manager at Egenera states that they are not “looking for any other distributor” at this point. For the last five years, Egenera sold through Fujitsu as part of and OEM agreement that added its software to Fujitsu's Bladeframe product. Banfield points out that this agreement with Fujitsu will end in August but the new distribution deal with give existing Fujitsu Engenera customers a clear upgrade path from the discontinued OEM product. Banfield states that the firm had no plans to engage in future OEM agreements but instead aimed to position itself as a “true independent software vendor”.
Both Thomas and Banfield agree that lots of vendors are looking at offering a vblock style management platform and highlight the acquisition by Dell last year of Scalent and HP's own blade matrix as examples. “... but we appeal to partners who don’t want a proprietary solution,” claims Thomas.