Egenera, which claims it's the archetype Virtualization 2.0 company to VMware's Virtualization 1.0 - and is going put its PAN Manager software on other people's hardware to prove it - has convinced Fujitsu Siemens, which OEMs Egenera's BladeFrame servers, to put PAN on its own industry-standard Primergy servers. It's Egenera's first PAN partnership since the American company said last week that it was setting up a software line of business around PAN and would move the software out through fellow OEMs. Fujitsu Siemens says the widgetry will form part of its FlexFrame Infrastructure, its latest milestone in its Dynamic Data Center strategy of creating business-responsive IT using the latest virtualization and automation technologies.

Watching VMware stock and its market cap spike since it IPO'd must have had Red Hat positively pea green with envyWatching VMware stock and its market cap spike since it IPO'd must have had Red Hat positively pea green with envy - so green in fact that it's gonna try taking VMware on by pushing the Xen virtualization integrated in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Red Hat's new goal is to underpin 50% of the world's servers by 2015. And since virtualization is projected to take over the world by then that's a lot of Xen virtualization - and there's no extra cost in it like there is with VMware since it's bundled with RHEL. (Red Hat's telling people they'll save $20,000-$30,000 a server.) Red Hat claims it's got its first 18,000 virtualized servers - although it's a little fuzzy about whether those 18,000 are actually in production - anyway, it's confident they'll get there eventually after all the testing and evaluating is done.

The infamous Microsoft-Novell interoperability/patent protection deal that FOSSers love to hate just passed its first birthday and, bragging that it's exceeded their original business targets, the pair has extended the arrangement. They're going to create a cross-platform accessibility model that links the existing Windows and Linux frameworks used to build assistive technology products that enable people with disabilities to interact with computers. At the same time they disclosed the names of 30 new customers, including Costco, Southwest Airlines, the City of Los Angeles and Zabka Polska, one of the largest retail chains in Poland, that will be getting Microsoft certificates for three-year priority support subscriptions for SUSE.

A start-up called Zonbu started peddling a small router-size Gentoo Linux-based consumer PC pre-loaded with a swat of free or open source applications and games, stuff like the OpenOffice suite, the Firefox web browser, Skype's VoIP and the Acrobat Reader. Users can't install any applications on the thing - well, there's no drive - but besides what Zobu provides - which pretty much covers all the bases - they can use other people's web-based applications. What we're talking about here is Evolution e-mail and calendaring; Pidgin instant messaging; a couple of P2P clients that support BitTorrent, eDonkey and eMule protocols; the Banshee music library; Mplayer media player; F-Spit photo organizer; Scribus desktop publishing; GimpShop image workshop; Nvu web page editor as well as a dictionary, encyclopedia, thesaurus, notepad, Gnu personal finance manager and Zip extractor.

Lumen Software, a leading provider of commercial open source Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and portal solutions, today announced its flagship platform, Lumenation, and the Lumenation Software Development Kit (SDK), are available immediately for free download. The products give PHP and AJAX developers a way to rapidly build, deploy, manage, and sell SaaS applications.

Money-starved Israeli start-up iROWS, a browser-based spreadsheet that kicked off in January, is going to shut down on December 31 because Google has sucked up its two founders to beef up the internally developed Spreadsheets widgetry that Google is using to frighten Microsoft.