Brocade’s Suitors – Further Review
- Brocade really does not fit Mark Hurd’s profile of “buy & optimize,” especially since Brocade moves so much FC and potentially FCoE through the likes of EMC and IBM. A deal with HP puts a significant percentage of the core Brocade Storage revenue (estimated at $1.1B for 2009) in an awkward position and would only motivate EMC to move more aggressively to Cisco – which TheInfoPro Storage research shows it has been slow to do.
- Juniper – it is common knowledge they looked at Brocade and passed before the Foundry acquisition. Everything for them is to promote JUNOS, so the Foundry piece would be a departure and be redundant with their Networking portfolio. Like Brocade, Juniper already has a reseller agreement in place with IBM for Networking equipment. We would think the storage business, especially FCoE, is interesting to them but we cannot see the reason why they would take on Foundry.
- Private equity firms could find Brocade of interest and one can only speculate that the reason for the article was to draw attention to this constituency. In that scenario, there would be the ability to sell off parts or string together more complementary products. In addition non-US technology companies may find the Brocade portfolio of interest. We will follow up on that thread in another posting as several other companies that we track in the TheInfoPro storage, networking and server studies would also be in that discussion.
Byline: Ken Male, CEO of TheInfoPro
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