Looks like they did come out with a new version of the article.
-- [B] JONAS ON NETWORKING: Ancor forces Brocade's hand --
By Gabrielle Jonas, BridgeNews
New York--June 22--Poor Brocade. The switching company received a slap on
the wrist Thursday when Ashok Kumar, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, said Brocade
shouldn't take credit for creating an open standard for its fiber channel
technology. Kumar argued Brocade was really throwing in the towel after
arch-rival Ancor "reverse engineered" Brocade's Fabric Shortest Path First
(FSPF) technology.
* * *
What is "reverse engineering"? It's a practice whereby one company unravels
the trade secret of another company by looking at the product and figuring out
how it was made.
The woman who made a name for herself in the 1980s by buying beloved food
products whipped up under trade secrets, such as Twinkies, bringing them to a
lab, having the ingredients broken down, and then copying them in a cookbook,
was practicing reverse engineering.
That's what Ancor, which has a teeny piece of the switching market, did
recently with Brocade's FSPF technology. However, there's a question as to
whether Brocade's version is itself original. "FSPF is a derivative of the OSPF
routing algorithm used in IP networks," Kumar said. "Brocade made minor
alterations and attempted to implement it as a proprietary routing protocol."
And Ancor, which is hungrily eyeing Brocade's lion's share of the fiber
market -- Brocade has 90% of the fabric channel fabric switch market, and 55% of
the switching market over
all -- claims it didn't decode Brocade's switching technology for its own
purposes, but for the greater good of the industry.
That's not quite true. It was in part for its own good, and in part to
embarrass Brocade. In an effort to take the teeth out of this proprietary
protocol, Ancor reverse-engineered FSPF with a great deal of ease -- enough to
make Brocade blush.
"Considering the speed of which Ancor did this work, it was obvious that
FSPF presented no barrier to entry for Ancor, or anybody else for that matter,"
Kumar said.
As a result, on Wednesday, with Brocade's blessing, the fiber channel
standards work group FC-SW-2 announced that earlier in the month it had
unanimously voted on one inter-switch routing protocol proposal to be submitted
ultimately as a standard by the American National Standards Institute
The FC-SW-2 workgroup includes the primary fiber channel switch suppliers:
Ancor Communications Inc., Brocade Communications Systems Inc., privately held
Gadzoox Networks Inc., McDATA Corp. (which is EMC majority-owned) and privately
held Vixel Corp.
"It was a good "save" by Brocade," Kumar said, "because it allowed Brocade
to make brownie points as a standard leader, when there was not that much
development and no way to protect it."
Ancor, for its part, is crowing over its success at decoding Brocade's
protocol.
In an exclusive interview with BridgeNews, Cal Nelson, president of Ancor,
sounded an unabashed note on the subject.
"We had to put very high-speed analyzers on the optical fiber in order to be
able to de-scramble the messages that the Brocade systems was sending out,"
Nelson said. "And by doing that, we were able to communicate with the Brocade
switch -- even though Brocade was not cooperating with that effort. We did that
only to show customers it could be done."
Well, that's not quite true. Ancor has every intention of using the protocol
for itself, Nelson said, so that it could achieve switch compatibility with
Brocade.
"Now that Brocade has consented to the standards, we are now free to use the
interface without any problem at all," Nelson said. "They advertised that
interface as an industry standard, but they weren't telling the rest of the
world what their messages were."
The reverse engineering could be looked at as taking from the rich to give
to the poor, though Nelson doesn't see it quite that way.
"This was not like reverse engineering a chip," Nelson said. "This was not
violating intellectual property. I hesitate to use the term 'reverse
engineering,'" he said. "Brocade, which has captured the largest percentage of
that storage networking switching market, did so by telling customers it could
only buy from Brocade, but now customers know they can buy from us as well and
have both switches in the network. In our opinion Brocade was trying to corner
the market and not let its customers have a choice of whose product to buy."
All other switch vendors had agreed to be compatible, except Brocade, said
Nelson, until now.
Wasn't that Brocade's option, though? Wasn't it its right? Nelson thinks
not, arguing it's an industry issue.
"On the local area network level," Nelson said, "Cisco and Juniper can
communicate with each other. If this can't be done all across all companies, you
end up connecting small groups of equipment rather than the world."
Nelson also successfully got others involved in the battle.
"We didn't put direct pressure on Brocade," Nelson said. "We asked customers
to put pressure on them. We firmly believe they were hurting the market by not
having the interoperability in the market they should have had."
Okay. So Brocade fibs and says it's being generous, when in fact Ancor
forced its hand. But shouldn't Kumar's ire really be directed at Ancor, instead
of Brocade? After all, that's the company that engaged in "reverse engineering."
At the heart of the issue is the tension between a vendor's right to have
proprietary products, which, without competing products, translates into high
margins, and interoperability, which allows these products to work with other
vendors' products. This makes the product appealing to carriers who want the
option to mix and match different products, such as switches and routers, from
different vendors.
"What they were doing was a serious disservice to the marketplace," Nelson
said. "If one vendor controls the market, it cripples it a bit. This'll be very
good for Brocade, because it makes the pie even bigger if their percentage
reduces," he said.
Brocade's CEO was not pleased.
"It is interesting the one guy who[se company] has an investment banking
relationship with Ancor and has a buy all the way down on the stock, is
constantly bashing Brocade," Gregory Reyes, president and CEO of Brocade, told
BridgeNews in an exclusive interview. "Since initiating coverage with our
company, Kumar's never met with us. The note Friday is an Ancor sales pitch.
Every chance he gets he throws stones at the company."
Piper Jaffray makes a market in Brocade as well as Ancor.
Added Reyes, "Brocade's got a track record of performance and [Piper
Jaffray's] banking relationship with Ancor needs to be seen for what it is: a
financial relationship that is highly suspect."
Kumar denies that. ""We do not have any banking relationship with Ancor," he
said.
For his part, Reyes denied Kumar's charge of Brocade not being interested in
universal standards.
"It's kind of tragic Kumar tries to pooh-pooh a company like Brocade that
had done so much for standards and interoperability," Reyes said. "I can't think
of anything that Ancor has contributed to any standards body. "
Ancor had nothing to do with Brocade making its protocol accessible, he
said. "For them to say they forced our hands, is an absurd notion --it's
asinine: It's mind numbing," Reyes said. "It's so amazing. It's like the mouse
that roared: Ashok Kumar from Piper Jaffray: He threw a stone heard around the
world."
The CEO's ire didn't end there. Reyes doubted whether Ancor's ability to use
Brocade's switching protocol would make any difference for Ancor.
"They have a hard enough time hooking their own switches together and making
them work," he said, "let alone figuring out how to hook them up to ours."
According to Reyes, market share has the final word on the subject.
"We're an industry leader. We're hitting our targets; we're a standards
leader. We've consistently beating analyst estimates, and we've got the broadest
customer base. Recently, we procured a strategic partnership with Cisco. At the
end of the day, whether Ancor reversed engineered our routing algorithm or not,
is a side-show. I think Ancor's financial performance speaks for itself." End
BridgeNews, Tel: (212) 372-7218
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