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Susan Davis, vice president of marketing and product management at Egenera Inc.

...and SANs. Now add PANs to your vocabulary of "[blank]-area network" acronyms. Processor-area networks, or PANs, may catch on as the hot buzzphrase of 2006 if the utility computing market starts to heat up. That's the hope of Susan Davis, vice president of marketing and product management at Egenera Inc. in Marlboro, Mass. Her company sells a rack of server blades called BladeFrame, which isn't very different from what many other commodity blade makers do. But Egenera adds PAN Manager, a tool that creates "an identity of a server entirely in software," Davis says. She claims that PAN Manager lets you define an application's underlying operating system, network connections, memory needs and other hardware dependencies and then just walk away. PAN Manager determines which blade or blades the app will run on, provisions the devices appropriately, then boots up the app. A BladeFrame system links the I/O of the blades installed in it via a proprietary 10Gbit/sec. fabric. Naturally, all data is offloaded to a storage-area network. Today, you can have 24 blades in a rack. In the first half of next year, Davis says, Egenera will add the ability to link multiple BladeFrames. BladeFrames start at $89,900.

Bring your remote workers into...

Aventail's device helps to secure collaboration among remote workers.

...meetings, securely. By month's end, Seattle-based Aventail Corp. plans to release its Secure Collaboration appliance. According to Sarah Daniels, Aventail's vice president of product management and marketing, the appliance lets end users set up ad hoc but secure Web conferences, share videos and exchange instant messages. Meanwhile help desk workers can use it to access and take control of remote devices for troubleshooting and repair. Daniels says the appliance integrates with voice-over-IP software on PCs, enabling VoIP technology to be used in a secure, collaborative environment. The appliance, which starts at $4,995, can handle up to 500 concurrent users.

Spitzer spurs interest in software for...

John Bosley, chief operating officer at Bonaire Software Solutions LLC

...managing financial-industry assets. According to John Bos¿ley, there are two software eras for developers of tools that help financial services firms manage the assets: the pre-Eliot Spitzer days, and the years since 1999, when the New York state attorney general began slapping fines on Wall Street firms for fraudulent practices. Bos¿ley, who is chief operating officer at Bonaire Software Solutions LLC in Boston, says that in the Spitzer era, demand has been skyrocketing for his company's RevPort software, which documents the fees a brokerage can charge for, say, managing mutual