ChannelWorld.in, Strategic insights for solution providers

Dutta: Whenever there is a paradigm shift or emergence of new technology maps in the industry, credibility is very important. We have trailing blaze of glory in the SAN space (across datacentre) for over one and half decades. I don’t want to talk about Cisco or Juniper, but if you look from SAN perspective, we have a dominant market share of over 70 percent. The fact that 14 out of 17 standards are either authored or co-authored by us speaks of our obvious level of influence and leadership in this space. CIOs of larger enterprises do understand the advantages of datacentre architecture and there is high level of awareness amongst them.

Dutta: Right now, we are standing at crossroads of paradigm shift in terms of adoption, evolution, and complexity. There is a surge in new generation of increasingly connected users across home and business through end devices and smart phones. With more video, voice files, photos, the payload is much more and importantly business environment needs to be secure and compliant. There is no other choice but the network to transform itself. We are one of the new players who have the datacenter legacy and product arsenal to address this technology shift.

Dutta: Cisco came into SAN in 2006 with an intention to takeover the SAN space. They are becoming more of a systems company than a networking company but we are purely focused on networking needs of enterprises. The market leadership worldwide and in Asia-Pacific (about 85 percent) speak for themselves. The heart of Brocade One is Virtual Cluster Switching (VCS) which is redefining the paradigm for connectivity. In the past, Cisco had spanning protocols to manage links which we replaced with TRILL which came from Fabric Shortest Path First (FSPF) protocol. TRILL in IP space has been an old SAN protocol since ten years .That’s a great example of what we bring in. Most vendors have to build datacentre architecture from scratch while we are porting technology from SAN (with few tweaks). It is easy for vendors to claim they are rearchitecturing datacenter space, but how effective is the crucial question.

Dutta: We bought Foundry due to tremendous interest shown by our existing customers. Fibre channel is known for quality, reliability and interoperability as you cannot afford to lose a frame as it deals with mission critical data. With emergence of 1Gig Ethernet, 10 Gig Ethernet, some of these standards predominant in fibre space could now be incorporated in IP space. And Brocade is poised perfectly as experts of managing mission critical environments.
In 2011, the enterprise networking market will be around $6 billion and growing at 12 percent CAGR in APAC. We play in about 70 percent which is over $4 billion, which is a huge opportunity for partners. After Foundry acquisition, our adjacent addressable market is 10 times more than SAN space. We have end-to-end solutions from core of datacentre to service provider edge to emerge as a viable market leader.

Dutta: Yes to an extent. 100G would be most demanding in service provider space as it makes sense for them to have more speed at acceptable price ratio. However, it will transcend to other market segments. We make many products and have a strong arsenal of 10G products; so we don’t want to move them to 100G if they don’t need.

Dutta: There is certain level of benefit of cloud, but there are many hidden costs and factors which people need to cross check. I think public cloud will take time but small pockets of private clouds running some applications will be prevalent. We have started to see private cloud implementations at our end.

Dutta: We are very committed with channel partners as our success lies in deselecting rather than selecting partners. We sincerely do not want to have hundreds of partners but right partners with right skill sets and high competence. In last two quarters, we have recruited 50 people and we will add 25 more in next quarter in APAC. We have built service and support wrapper around the technology that is leveraged through partners and us.

Dutta: No. It depends on maturity of enterprise architecture and customer needs. Brocade One has more relevance than cloud in today’s times. We are driving simplicity and making sure network is up whether on cloud or not. For all new or old networks, Brocade One is ideal fit for new generation applications.

In last few months, few countries in APAC implemented VCS for big campus implementation to reduce complexity and flatten network. All partners selling Hyper-V from Citrix, Microsoft,VMware can sell our products. Similarly, our partners can sell their Hyper –V as part of ‘end to end’ solution stack.

Dutta: Partners can easily sell a visible international brand like Brocade. We encompass simple yet strong technology and Brocade One is a value proposition for their customers. Money they make while selling Brocade backed by rebates and back end is good. With market opportunity and paradigm shift, Brocade with its datacentre legacy, robust R&D and partner ecosystem would be a stronger player as we step into 2011.