Egenera has made a rare acquisition, picking a young Dublin ISV called Fort Technologies that brings the Massachusetts firm private and public cloud management sort of along the lines of what Cloupia is bringing Cisco and Gale is bringing Dell.

Egenera, however, is way ahead of them since the integration is already done.

It rolled out the goods Wednesday in its PAN Cloud Director which builds on PAN Manager, the company’s traditional widgetry for converging infrastructure, pooling servers, storage and networking and adding high availability and disaster recovery.

Besides the Guinness, terms weren’t disclosed.

PAN is already used by a lot of cloud service providers and government agencies going to the cloud.

Fort offers a self-service catalog and a drag-and-drop palette that makes designing, provisioning and delivering clouds faster and simpler, more secure and resilient.

It’s also got integrated pricing and reporting capabilities for real-time billing and monitoring cloud chargebacks or showbacks.

Egenera expects the acquisition to expand its sales footprint, partner network and customer base in EMEA.

Fort Technologies’ personnel have already been moved into Egenera’s Cloud Products Group and its CEO, Gerry Murray, will head Egenera’s EMEA operations.

Unlike other cloud management products, Egenera’s PAN Cloud Director lets organizations turn any infrastructure – not just virtualized servers – into reliable, scalable and elastic cloud resources.

That means bare metal physical or virtual servers or a mix of the two environments.

Besides any server, it can handle any storage, switches, applications, hypervisors and operating systems – at the same time and all without vendor lock-in.

All users have to do is dial in their required service levels and the cloud services are guaranteed to automatically meet their security, performance and availability requirements.

They can have Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) as well as Metal-as- a-Service (MaaS) clouds, which is better for some apps.

John Fitzgerald, managing director of SP Interactive Network Communications GmbH, figures Egenera PAN Manager and PAN Cloud Director will significantly reduce his operating costs and dramatically shorten the time-to-market for his services.