Well, Egenera - which has no market cap at all because it hasn't gone public yet - claims it is.

IDC, which coined the term, defines "Virtualization 2.0" as the next step beyond server virtualization replete with faster provisioning, high availability, disaster recovery, resource balancing and ultimately policy-based automation.

Egenera says IDC is speaking its name.

While VMware and its hypervisor are good at virtualizing one server at a time to improve hardware utilization, Egenera can virtualize the data center, creating networks of virtual and physical servers, and move individual servers, groups of servers or entire systems from one place to another seamlessly and securely with verifiable disaster recovery and uptime.

So - convinced that accounts want more than server virtualization - Egenera is launching a software line of business and is going to put its PAN Manager software on other people's hardware - management being a weakness of VMware, which was supposed to buy Opsware to fill the gap until HP beat it to it.

Egenera's not saying whose hardware PAN will go on until it formally partners up with some OEMs - at least one of the Tier 1s and maybe more of the Tier 2s. Negotiations are evidently well advanced and the development done.

Egenera is hoping for an announcement in November. The OEMs will give it way more feet on the street than it has on its own and increase its addressable market.

According to Egenera CEO Mike Thompson the move is one of the most significant and strategic ones the company has made since it was started seven years ago involving as it does what he calls "the heart of our value proposition."

He also says Egenera has every intention of sticking with and enhancing its own BladeFrame hardware line that PAN has traditionally run.

PAN, which doesn't do hypervisors, combines VMware server virtualization - or Xen or Microsoft for that matter - with its own network and storage virtualization so all of the IT infrastructure can be allocated as needed. Egenera claims the result is rapid time-to-market, dynamic scalability and cost-effective high availability.

PAN can provision and manage both physical and virtual servers, virtual networks and storage. The company has patented its N+1 availability and disaster recovery technologies and its stock-in-trade has historically been right sizing and scalability through dynamic repurposing.

The widgetry includes chargeback capabilities, logical secure partitioning and named pools of resources.

Egging it on IDC believes customers are poised to move to "Virtualization 2.0" in the name of CAPEX reductions, lower operating costs, improved service levels and better responsiveness to changing business needs.

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