Bottom line, do you see them getting sales in the really hot fibre product areas, like Fibre Channel Fabric switches (Brocade's top product), or FCAL hubs or other fibre channel products that are not mainframe related?
It looks that way, Tony. Right now, Brocade is still supplying switches to Mcdata but just as Brocade is getting into the director switch business, Mcdata also seems to be getting into the FC switch business as indicated by this disclosure (below) in the prospectus. Ancor, Brocade and Mcdata all supply EMC with director switches and FC switches so they will all interoperate anyway.
We have developed ASIC technology that serves as the foundation for the development of a complete family of SAN products. Our ASICs provide building blocks at the circuit level for implementing fibre channel switches. These ASICs
combine a number of fibre channel functions in a single chip that substantially reduces the number of components needed in our fibre channel switches. Our years of design expertise in fibre channel technology and large scale switching solutions allows us to deploy high availability SAN fabrics.
These ASICs are used in our next generation switch products, which are currently undergoing testing. The implementation of our new switch architecture is based on a common hardware and software design. The architecture enables product designs that span the high-end and mid-range storage computing environments with gigabit performance and 24x7 operation............
.....Our next generation of fibre channel SAN products provides the highest port density, non-blocking, single stage switch that enables a fabric to scale beyond 8000 ports. In addition to the support for full duplex 1.0625 Gbps ports at very low latencies, the design supports 2.125 Gbps and future 10 Gbps links.
I'm not too clear yet on how the 1998 settlement of the patent infringment lawsuits between Brocade and Mcdata will affect the plans of these two companies. It may very well be that both companies effectively decided to cross-license everything up to that point in time and then compete in the marketplace. After all, both were heavily involved in validating the market for FC switches.
I think they're going to keep their main focus on the support-oriented director switch business and the outsourcing-friendly FC switch business. Also, from the look of their FabricReady solutions program, Mcdata is also looking to capitalize on the lack of interoperability in the FC market. Further on down the road, a decent stock currency gives them more options to fuel more growth.
The Elite Solutions Partners sell McDATA's FabricReady Solutions
FabricReady Solutions are comprehensive packages comprised of hardware, software, and services that solve today?s toughest IT challenges, including server and storage consolidation and LAN free backup and tape consolidation.
The FabricReady program provides:
-- End-to-end solutions tested and qualified at both McDATA's and our FabricReady Partners' integration labs under jointly defined and approved test plans
-- A comprehensive education program for your systems integrator that covers implementation and troubleshooting of the solution
-- Application-based methodologies that enable the best solution to be specified for every customer environment
mcdata.com
I agree with you that Mcdata has to downplay its mainframe heritage because that leaves them vulnerable to the typically noisy guerrila marketing tactics of their rivals that will obviously try to paint them as dowdy mainframe vendors.
However, I think that the mainframe and supercomputer markets will consolidate and be around for a long time and be a lucrative niche market. All you have to do is look around at the kind of physical anomalies at the confounding edge of science to see what I mean. For example, they're beginning to discover that under certain conditions, light can be made to slow down or......more astonishingly, light can be made to travel faster than the speed of light. Building out the science to eventually explain anomalies like those will require the kind of computing granularity that only mainframes and supercomputers can provide.
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