Competitive landscape for Brocade is pretty weak. The Red Herring article is pretty good for a snapshot of the potential here.
Brocade was actually the first company to build a fibre channel (FC) switch for the dominant application today, Storage Area Networks (SAN). Their Silkworm switch debuted in March of 1997 and was introduced as the FC switch used in Sequent's NUMAQ platform.
Since then Brocade has gone on to completely dominate the FC switch space. They have the current lion's share of the installed market of FC switches (some figures it as large as 80%+), they certainly have signed up almost every single major OEM after Sequent, and they recently introduced a new line of switches (Silkworm 2000) that clearly put them technologically ahead of any real competition.
Ancor (ANCR), while actually introducing a FC switch before Brocade, actually went after a market segment that turned out to be a bust (basically LAN communications as opposed to SAN communications). They quickly retooled their product to provide SAN capabilities, and they have been chasing Brocade ever since. Their problem is that they have no significant installed base, a technically clunky product from every viewpoint, and without the signing of two recent OEM partners, Hitachi Data Systems, and Sun Microsystems, they would definitely be a non-entity. The street seems to believe Ancor will introduce a new switch in the Fall, but they have a lot to fix in their base switch architecture before they will be taken seriously as providing a competitive offering to Brocade.
Gadzoox (ZOOX), and Vixel (VIXL), are companies that dominate a technology segment of the FC market that is actually slowing in growth, the Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) market. The technology that they build is something called a FC-AL Hub. Both have also recently announced product plans to introduce a FC switch (probably due to the increasing customer trend to move away from FC Hubs to deploying FC switches). Vixel actually recently introduced its Rapport 8100 FC switch and PC Week just did a first glance review of it at zdnet.com.
In moving to the FC switch market it's just important to remember that unlike FC Hubs where Gadzoox and Vixel had no other serious competition, in moving to the much larger, faster growing, FC switch market, that they have to compete with an already established market leader which commands a dominating lead in the space. It's all uphill for them.
That's probably a lot more than you wanted to read anyway, but lastly there is also some competitive pressure from EMC's McData subsidiary and their FC switch offerings, but since McData is an OEM customer of Brocade's, it's not as clear cut as Ancor, Gadzoox, and Vixel. That being said, the EMC-McData Connectrix switch is one to keep an eye on. (no real market share yet, but sold by an experienced aggressive company) |
