On June 9, 2010, a special day for me, Brocade officially announced their converged data center strategy with the release of Brocade One. Brocade One has a familiar goal of simplifying the data center architecture while reducing costs. Brocade plans on leveraging the assets of Foundry Networks (acquired by Brocade in 2008) while creating a “unified view of the data center as a network” (Brahm).
With this announcement, Brocade is sounding the “all-hands” alarm and pointing the ship directly at both Cisco and Juniper. Cisco’s UCS continues to evolve into a formidable next generation data center architecture backed with new products and software offerings. Meanwhile, Juniper’s Project Stratus isn’t due to be launched until 2011; fueling Juniper to sign an OEM agreement with Dell for next-generation networking.
No posting about the next-generation data center would be complete without mentioning both HP and IBM. In May, HP announced that they are a founding member of the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF) along with Juniper, Brocade, Microsoft, and others (http://www.ucif.org). IBM is notably absent from the UCIF along with Cisco; a coincidence or a sign of things to come?
Finally, while Brocade’s announcement is “interesting”, will anyone notice? Brocade’s messaging isn’t as refined as their larger competitors and they are arguing that their competitors are putting intelligence in the server while they are putting it into the network. <Insert Qualification Argument Here> One lingering question; Is Brocade serious about going at it alone or are they making themselves a more attractive take-over target?
PlatenReport 
Who’s left that has the capability and interest in acquiring a networking company? The regular suspects seem to have their strategies in place, so I wonder if there are some smaller or lesser known international players that might be a good fit?