Brocade gearing up to fight 'Cisco fatigue'

Brocade is painting itself as the alternative to Cisco that IT administrators have been looking for.

With its acquisition of Ethernet vendor Foundry Networks expected to close by year's end, the storage networking company will have products for everything from data centers to the Internet, easing "Cisco fatigue," executives said Wednesday at an analyst conference. Brocade will be the only other company that can offer connectivity on both sides of servers, to the LAN and the storage network, they said. (Read more on Brocade's Foundry acquisition.)

Brocade is better able than Cisco to cooperate with key system vendors such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard and EMC because of its deep, longtime relationships with those companies, said T.J. Grewal, vice president of corporate development. Interoperability with other vendors' products will be critical as enterprises ease into transformations of their data centers. Recent moves by Cisco make it look more like a competitor of the system vendors, he said. Cisco has been pushing to put more of the intelligence of data centers in the network infrastructure.

"There's a sense here that there hasn't been a credible alternative to Cisco," said Ian Whiting, vice president and general manager of Brocade's Data Center Infrastructure division.

Amid falling stock markets and devastation among Wall Street investment banks, CEO Michael Klayko was asked repeatedly about the financing of the US$3 billion Foundry acquisition through Bank of America and Morgan Stanley, and finally grew testy.

"We're very confident we're going to fund this deal. ... Does anyone else want to ask this question?" he said.

The company hasn't changed its forecast for the current quarter, which called for revenue of $375 million to $385 million and earnings per share of $0.04 or $0.05, and remained optimistic about the longer-term outlook.

For its full 2008 fiscal year, ending next month, Brocade expects its revenue to grow 17 percent from fiscal 2007 and earnings per share to rise between 11 percent and 12 percent. Foundry will boost the company's profit by about 5 percent in fiscal 2009 and about 20 percent in 2010, counting savings from synergies and other adjustments, Brocade estimated.

"Our fundamentals haven't changed. Data hasn't stopped growing," Klayko said.

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