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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Greg Hull who wrote (17339)	2/6/2000 4:26:00 PM
From: buck	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

you believe Brocade can/will be a Gorilla in Fibre Channel switching? I believe Brocade has the best chance to be a gorilla in this space, simply because they have an announced and demonstrated commitment to software as a value-added function to their switches. I personally don't believe that this value-add is really possible at the switching level, because of the nature of switching per se, as I described in my post. Ancor, on the other hand, seems to be pursuing a "me faster, me hardware, me better" approach. This will ultimately triumph at the core of the SAN...but it is not a gorilla by definition. Someone could come along, and switch faster with more ports per square foot or whatever. The biggest question mark is whether Ancor can integrate value-added software with their hardware, OR OR OR whether Brocade can integrate newer, higher-performing hardware with their industry-leading software. Again, I believe the battle is between these two. The direction of that battle will be defined by the market and what they demand. Using the LAN/WAN model, that is so well defined for us, tells us that VERY FAST SOFTWARE wins. IMVHO, of course. I could be a mile off base here. Why would the Big Boys (EMC, IBM, Compaq, SUN) of storage tolerate the presence of a Gorilla in FC switching when they have it in their power to squash the possibility now? Personally, I don't believe that there is enough revenue relative to the big stuff (storage) on the PO to bother. Of course, EMC has McDATA doing in-house design work for them, so they are an exception. The others are all OEMing the technology. Sun has Ancor, IBM has Brocade, Compaq has Gadzoox. And so on throughout PlatformLand. In this sense, platform vendors vs. switch makers, I think the revenue potential is too small to divert precious engineering resources. The follow-on to that is whether the little guys will be bought by a powerhouse or not. Again, I have to say...I dunno. buck