Brocade Buys Foundry for $2.6 Billion

Brocade has wrapped up its $2.6 billion acquisition of Foundry and appointed two non-Foundry executives to look after its overall product offer and run a technology office. No Foundry executives have been appointed to any positions in Brocade. The acquisition has just completed and Foundry's operation will be integrated throughout Brocade. There is no mention of setting up an Ethernet switching division and no mention of any roles for Foundry executives, led by their now ex-president and CEO, Bobby Johnson. Since it was an cash deal then everyone with Foundry shares can take the cash and run.

Brocade is currently organized into three main divisions. Luc Moyen runs its server division, looking after the embedded switch and server connectivity strategy. This is an area where Cisco looks to be slightly ahead, at least as far as VMware servers are concerned with its virtual switch strategy and its investment in VMware" wrote Chris Mellor.

Where will Brocade focus its efforts?

"It will press on with DCX and FCoE and its HBA/converged network adapter strategy. It may well take on thrusting Ethernet suppliers such as Blade Network Technologies but an issue is intelligence in the network" wrote Chris Mellor.

"Presently there is a lot of SAN intelligence in Brocade's directors and the DCX. Will this survive the transition to FCoE? Cisco has yet to show signs of transitioning its MDS storage switching functionality into its Ethernet switches. This SAN intelligence is something that Brocade can use, either to make a block storage-aware Ethernet switch or to push downstream, in whole or part, to a virtual switch running as a VMware virtual machine or its equivalent in a Hyper-V environment" wrote Chris Mellor.

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Article written December 22, 2008. Abbreviated article by Chris Mellor. www.channelregister.co.uk.