We plan to more than double our headcount

What has been the impact of the Foundry acquisition on Brocades strategy?

The recent Foundry acquisition opens up new markets and revenue
opportunities for Brocade. Globally, Brocade has operations in over eighteen
countries, with a headcount of 3,950 employees and combined revenues of
approximately $2 bn. Post the acquisition, there is an overlap of only 5%
between the customer bases of the two companies, and we see a huge sales
opportunity to cross-sell products and services into these companies. Brocade
completed the acquisition of Foundry Networks on Dec 19, 2008. By combining
Foundrys expertise in high-performance Ethernet networking with Brocades
expertise in the data center, together we will provide significant value for the
worlds most complex and data-intensive businesses. The acquisition has been
very well received by our employees.

What is Brocades India strategy?

Brocades R&D center in India currently has a headcount of more than a 100
people, and we plan to more than double our headcount by adding around 140
people. Brocade proposes to hire fresh college graduates. The India center
primarily works on the core technologies involving storage, Data Center Ethernet
applications and manageability, ASIC design and testing.

What are the latest trends and drivers in data center networking and
storage?

Server virtualization, the growth of digital data, and the adoption of Web
2.0 applications are driving the need for highly flexible, highly scalable, high
performing data center architectures. Organizations are looking to leverage
existing Ethernet infrastructureFiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) allows
organizations to extend the reliability and network services benefits of Fiber
Channel to Ethernet networks. Brocade is helping to drive the FCoE standard and
is taking an evolutionary approach to deliver the right solutions for building
CEE networks. As the standards become more defined and the technology more
robust, FCoE solutions will ultimately move from the server edge to the core of
the data center. Brocade is developing a wide range of solutions that provide
the most flexibility in terms of deploying FCoE in current infrastructures.
These initial solutions will provide the ability to converge server I/O for a
wide range of server types.

Sudesh Prasad

sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in