Brocade Calls Cisco On Efficiency

“We didn’t say let’s build a green product. We just built the most reliable product,” he says. Using fewer  chips and better ASIC designs means more reliable products, with fewer chips – and they draw less power.

Pushing into the LAN

Pushing into the LAN is partly politics, he says, and Brocade’s storage strength is already opening doors for the Foundry products. Large organisations have a CIO, and separate people in charge of storage and networks: “We have access to the storage director and the CIO – we can ask to be introduced to the network side.”

Pressure for better returns on an investmen are already putting pressure on customers’ affection for Cisco, he says: “We expected to find that 30 percent of LAN customers would stick to Cisco no matter what – we’ve found that element is much smaller than we thought.” It’s also a help that IP switches are easy to mix and match between vendors.

Foundry products were typically not as price-competitive as they might have been, says Phillips, partly because of the company’s insistence on manufacturing in America. “We can drive significant cost out of the Foundry products, by moving the manufacturing.” That would allow better margins for resellers, as well as better prices for users.

Overall, vendors are moving into new areas, driving more mergers and acquisitions. Ethernet switch makers like Extreme and Juniper will need to have storage products, and server makers will have to think about their partnerships with SAN players: “There will be consolidation, and convergence is inevitable,” says Phillips.

But Brocade, he thinks will be more of a match for Cisco in the contests it chooses.