A year ago, the situation was very different. Brocade was sitting on its huge market lead in Fibre Channel fabric switches, while also trying to extend up into the FC director space. That was Plan A.
Then came Cisco. With its Andiamo Systems Inc. spin-in, Cisco was promising to deliver an intelligent, FC-based switch platform that would incorporate features like volume management traditionally deployed on the host.
Time for Plan B. Brocade announced its intentions, in March 2002, to deliver a "V-switch" that would virtualize the connections among multiple vendors' servers and storage. But by all appearances, no actual product development had occurred: It was a virtual product in the literal sense of the word. When CEO Greg Reyes was asked on a conference call with investors about the V-switch technology Brocade had already supposedly developed, he said this: "We continued to refine and develop a better understanding of this requirement [for virtualization]... As we worked more closely in understanding the needs of the marketplace, we came to learn of Rhapsody, and this is a very, very logical combination."
It sounds as if there was nothin' there but slideware, a placeholder until Brocade figured out what the hell it was going to do to counter the Cisco/Andiamo threat. Fast forward to this week: Problem solved, at least as far as giving Brocade the right weapons to take on Cisco.
In relation to Cisco, Brocade has a strong story. Reyes, in outlining the strategy behind the deal, repeatedly hammered home the point that Brocade, unlike Cisco, has always had an OEM model. Brocade says it will work with OEMs which include EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) to let them embed their own software onto the Rhapsody platform.
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