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Technology Stocks : The New QLogic (ANCR) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Pigboy who wrote (27708)	8/25/2000 2:17:13 PM
From: Gus	Respond to of 29386

Does anyone think that Brocade may acquire or merge or something in the director class switch? It's an interesting question seeing as there are still only three main players (QLGC, Inrange, McData). This market will start taking off in early 2001, imo. It will not be a small market... ...or at around $800 - $1,000 a port. It looks like a fairly obvious forced move, doesn't it? Brocade acquiring director-class switch technology, I mean. Let's see, there's a high-performance distance-specialist like CMNT -- which would probably team with McDATA first before it teams with the 1999 king of the degraded loop -- and the strong-second tandem of Inrange and Q-Logic. There are also a couple of start-ups working on using the director-switch as the platform for converging all the nice-sounding buzz words -- VI, Infiniband, GE, IP, etc. Unfortunately, while everybody can do basic high-redundancy, only a very few can do basic high-availability. Rarer still are those who can do high-availability and turn that into a useful tool for key custom application developers, some of whom are measured and compensated on the basis of competitive metrics that range from 100% ROI over 9 months (best case) to 400% ROI over 2.3 years (industry average). That means Brocade is stuck with its pay-more-as-you-go approach -- future management nightmares in drag -- as the market moves from 2-4 switch implementations (trial/departmental market) to much larger enterprise-wide implementations with carefully planned outsourcing hooks with the advent of bandwidth on demand and storage on demand. Methinks Brocade stands a very good chance of getting kicked off ignonimously off the 2Gbps island if it continues to obstruct the various interoperability iniatives designed to fuel the growth of this industry. Some of you will remember that the schism in OSFI -- a five-member offshoot of the FibreAlliance! -- continues to be 4 (McDATA, Vixel, Gadzoox, Ancor/Q-Logic) vs 1 (Brocade). A no-brainer,no contest in the medium-term.