TheInfoPro

High Profile Breaches and Mobile Devices are key spending drivers according to a report authored by Daniel Kennedy, former Wall Street Chief Information Security Officer and now Research Director for Information Security at TheInfoPro

NEW YORK, November 17, 2011 – TheInfoPro, a division of leading analyst and data company The 451 Group, recently released the findings from its bi-annual study of the Information Security market, where the source of the data is in-depth, one-on-one interviews with over 150 decision-makers in the Global 2000. Key findings include: …

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07 October 2009 – After fully digesting the Wall Street Journal’s pieces on Brocade being quietly put up for sale,  we have some new “upon further review” data points in relation to the suitors being discussed:

-   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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06 October 2009 - An article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (10/5/09) revealed that Brocade is putting themselves up for sale. Although the article cites unnamed sources and was not confirmed by any of the companies mentioned,  it is interesting to take a look at the dynamics in this market that would lead one to think that where there is smoke there is fire. We have seen a number of data points within our own recent storage studies that may indicate the motivation:

• Growth forecast for FCoE and 8Gbps/16Gbps are not nearly as high as some vendors expected.
• FCoE will be the future transport but most anticipate the future to be 3 to 5 years off instead of 1 to 3 years, based on our data.
• End users currently associate FCoE with VMWare server growth and other non-mission critical apps so they can slow FC growth. In other words, substitution technologies, not additive.
• Upgrade activity from 4Gbps to 8Gbps is moving at half the pace of the 2Gbps to 4Gbps rates. Storage switch port growth rates are slowing in the large enterprise with VMware adoption rates.  Switch port counts may actually decrease in some shops.

A number of possible suitors have been mentioned including Hewlett-Packard and Oracle. Also in the mix, one would imagine, would be EMC, Juniper, and IBM. HP was the company most prominently mentioned so we took an early look at what an HP and Brocade combination would look like. Brocade’s storage and networking business would be complementary to HP’s business as well as additive to its revenue although Brocade’s reseller and OEM partners may change. It would put them in even more direct competition with Cisco, as well as help them improve in several key areas. On the Oracle front, end users are unsure of Oracle’s commitment to hardware with the Sun acquisition. Acquiring Brocade only makes sense if Oracle is committed to keeping the Sun hardware business.
 
Again, none of the companies involved has confirmed anything in the WSJ article so we will have to stay tuned to see how this plays out. However, given the consolidation we continue to see in the market we believe this situation is more a matter of when rather than if.

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By: Antone Gonsalves
06 October 2009 | Information Week | Original Article

The growing competition between Cisco (NSDQ: CSCO) and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) would likely heat up if the …

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