Egenera, a developer of management and automation technology for physical, virtual and cloud data centers, on Wednesday said it has acquired Fort Technologies, a Dublin, Ireland-based developer of cloud lifecycle software.

For Egenera, the decision to acquire Fort Technologies was a simple one because Egenera OEM'd Fort's technology as the basis of its PAN Cloud Director, said Pete Manca, CEO of Boxborough, Mass.-based Egenera.

PAN Cloud Director cloud management software allows customers to design, request, provision and manage IT as a service, and it provides administrators with the ability to manage, track and bill for services.

[Related: Egenera PAN Manager Builds Clouds On Heterogeneous Server Infrastructures]

Egenera was the sole OEM of Fort Technologies' cloud management software, Manca said. "It was a gem of a company," he said. "We originally stumbled on it via another reseller and signed the OEM deal with them about a year ago. We didn't want that hanging out there without us owning it."

Egenera's acquisition of Fort Technologies comes on the heels of two other similar acquisitions. Cisco last month acquired Cloupia, an infrastructure management software provider. Dell last month acquired Gale Technologies, an infrastructure automation software developer.

Manca said that while Egenera's acquisition of Fort Technologies may look like a response to the acquisitions of Cloupia and Gale, his company has actually been working on the acquisition for about four months.

The PAN Cloud Director offers more functionality than what Cloupia offers, including the ability to add disaster recovery and high-availability capabilities, Manca said.

"We're completely open and heterogeneous," he said. "Cloupia works only with Cisco. And, we let customers rebadge our offering as their own product if they want."

Egenera declined to unveil the terms of the acquisition.

PUBLISHED DEC. 5, 2012