What is Brocades strategic direction?
Hurley: There are multiple threads to its ongoing strategy. First, it is looking to protect and grow its installed base through enhanced support and upgrade programs. The development of the SAN Health program is one example of this effort: Brocade provides a free service helping customers determine where the problems are in the overall SAN, making sure customers can pin down problems — which helps alleviate a lot of finger pointing. The service also helps users tune their networks, increasing customer satisfaction. Brocade also plans to aggressively innovate. They will be enhancing the directors to support 256 ports and have already added 4G to the midrange switches. Expect intelligent services on the multiprotocol router (which is the Rhapsody platform) sometime next year. Finally, it intends to drive down costs by leveraging common ASICs and software across all of the platforms. Kerns: Some of the other vendors have been a little quicker to introduce larger port count switches, IP c
