Soweeeee-side watch.
SAN JOSE -(Dow Jones)- Brocade Communications Systems Inc. lowered its fourth-quarter earnings estimates to 7 cents a share on revenue of $152 million to $153 million, as weakness in information technology spending continues to hurt results.
In August, the company said it expected fourth quarter earnings of 10 cents a share on sales of $160 million to $165 million........
.....A Thomson First Call survey of 24 analysts produced a mean earnings estimate of 9 cents a share for the fourth quarter, and 17 analysts produced a mean revenue estimate of $159.9 million for the networking storage provider's fourth quarter ended Oct. 26.
biz.yahoo.com
The primary relationship in a storage network is still the relationship between the servers and the storage systems because applications run on servers and generate data that reside in external storage systems. It's generally not a very good idea for a switch vendor to compete with the server vendors or the storage system vendors which also happen to be the switch vendor's best customers since 80%-90% of all SANs are deployed by the system vendors.
Technically, Brocade's approach of overloading the switch with features is also inherently inferior to the approach of the server and storage vendors, which contemplate using either in-band or out-band appliances, or highly specialized servers, to add more intelligence to the storage network so that it can intelligently facilitate three basic types of data traffic: server-server, server-storage and storage-storage.
However, Brocade's main problem is that the server and storage vendors are fully capable of producing better in-band or out-band appliances -- and generally using firmware and software to redistribute the intelligence between the servers, the storage arrays, the HBAs, the switches and the storage appliances or specialized servers -- so that's why it is rushing to add more features to their switch platform before it is even capable of true non-blocking operations. This is a variation of the marketing tactic popularized by Microsoft that even Microsoft is not using anymore as it inches toward the datacenter!!!!
.....Brocade has been considering scenarios in which it will increasingly compete with companies that have been its traditional partners. In fact, according to a Brocade insider who wished to remain anonymous, CEO Greg Reyes recently addressed the troops on this point: "The OEMs don't want us to build [a virtualization switch], but Greg said, 'We're going to f---ing build it anyway.' "
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