Cloud service provider Egenera has added PAN Manager Software support for Fujitsu blade servers, bringing converged infrastructure tools to the Japanese company’s products. Supporting the Fujitsu PRIMERGY BX900 Blade Server, this is the latest in a growing line of partnerships Egenera is forging, spreading its virtual software to another server provider.

This comes on the heels of Egenera’s deal with Dell, adding PAN Manager support for their hardware, as well as Egenera’s own BladeFrame offering. Citrix is a close partner of Egenera’s, and is pivotal in the company’s overall growth strategy. The company is using its string of allies to expand its presence in virtual management, banking on this particular area of growth.

Having started in server hardware development, the better part of Egenera’s decade of existence had little to do with virtual products at all. Making the switch to solely virtualized software meant a laser focus on its product offerings, but also left the company in need of good partnerships.

In Fujitsu’s case, teaming up with Egenera means a more complete infrastructure management system for existing and potential clients. It’s another effort towards unified computing, simplifying a data center that spans hardware, software and applications. Egenera has data deduplication, reallocation of storage resources, and other tools that provide some automation towards this simplification process.

In gaining such a breadth of high-level partners, Egenera is also gearing up for better market penetration. With hopes of providing viable alternatives to larger corporations’ more closed data center offerings, one important point of Egenera’s differentiating factor is its appeal of openness.

“This latest platform support is further evidence of Egenera’s commitment to delivering open, converged infrastructure solutions, which give customers the ability to select the hardware and storage of their choice, and avoid vendor lock-in,” said Egenera President and CEO Pete Manca.

“Furthermore, Egenera’s PAN Manager solution is on standard Ethernet, which is already pervasive. As a result, Egenera is speeding adoption, enabling customers to build mission-critical computing blocks using whatever virtualization, storage and hardware they want, with far fewer point-software components than the competition.”

This is an area Cisco is also moving into, with a series of Ethernet and other related announcements at an event this week. Even more important, then, for Egenera to keep its eye on the prize. Having this kind of focus on virtualized products, Egenera has actually positioned itself well for partnerships that center around blade server offerings. Their physical attributes are well suited for Egenera’s tools, and the budding market needs much of what Egenera has to offer. As blade servers grow in demand, we’re seeing a rising interest around their development and investment from the likes of IBM and Hitachi.

The markets Egenera is after mimic this trend as well, with financial and healthcare institutions topping the target list. These are crowded markets, as they’ve been driving much of the current demand for unified computing. Egenera will be appealing to mid-range businesses to prove its capabilities in this arena, hoping to make gains in other markets in the future.

“[Egnera is] targeting businesses that have a ground-up need,” says Albert Lee, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). “This is a big area that’s hard to start with, but at the same time, if you succeed in that market, it will really validate their name brand in these vertical markets. Then other markets would take them seriously. Like retail.”

Indeed, retail is a major opportunity for growth in unified computing, as e-commerce places new demands for the industry’s infrastructure and communications needs. As retail becomes more involved in the technology sector, from mobile marketing and shopping to socially oriented recommendations, a streamlined approach for sharing networked data will bring more opportunities for companies like Egenera to claim their chunk of this market.