BW 12/01 11:00 Norwest Venture Capital Invests $5.8 Million in Brocade Communications
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PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 1, 1997--Norwest Venture Capital, one of the country's oldest and largest venture capital firms, today announced a $5.8 million investment in Brocade Communications, a leading provider of high-speed switching fabrics based on Fibre Channel.
Norwest invested behind other new participant, Weiss, Peck & Greer, and together with existing investors raised a total of more than $21 million for the company. Brocade will use the funding to accelerate the development of new products and features, and to rapidly expand all aspects of operations to meet product demand from its OEM and integrator partners.
"Today's data-intensive applications, higher speed networks and increasingly powerful CPUs are driving demand for flexible, high-bandwidth interoperability between mass storage devices and the desktop," said Kevin Hall, general partner at Norwest. "Brocade's switching technology will be at the core of corporations' move to employ Fibre Channel as the means to build scalable, reliable storage networks. With its extensive experience in the Fibre Channel industry and critical OEM partnerships, the company is well situated to lead this swiftly emerging market."
"Brocade has already established the lead in the switched fabric market," said Bruce Bergman, president and CEO of Brocade. "We intend to increase this lead through aggressive expansion of our marketing, sales and development efforts. Our partnership with Norwest will help us meet these goals while continuing to provide the product quality, performance, cost effectiveness and support that our customers expect."
Brocade develops and manufactures gigabit switching products based on the Fibre Channel industry standard, which is a high-speed data transfer interface technology. Fibre Channel, which is quickly becoming the de facto connectivity standard for high-speed mass storage access and server clustering, was developed to alleviate the performance and scalability limitations associated with traditional interface technologies.
Fibre Channel, with its data transfer rates of 1 gigabit per second and ability to support numerous devices across great distances, is ideal for imaging, video, graphics and mass data transfer applications. According to industry analyst firm Dataquest, the market for Fibre Channel devices will reach $1.2 billion by the end of 1998. Other Fibre Channel industry analysts project that the related market for switches alone will reach $500 million by 2000.
Brocade's gigabit Silkworm(TM) switches are used to create a robust, high-performance Fabric, an intelligent infrastructure of storage devices and servers that forms the foundation of a scalable network. The Brocade Fabric meets the essential requirements for building a server-storage area network: shared storage among multiple servers; network scalability; efficient and reliable transfers of large data blocks; complete data integrity and reliability; and fast data access and backup capabilities. Using Brocade Fabrics, corporations can enable users to access and transmit data from anywhere in a network quickly and reliably.
Brocade joins Norwest's portfolio of communications equipment companies, which already includes Xylan, Advanced Fibre Communications, P-COM, Corsair Communications, Nashoba Networks (now part of Cisco Systems), Agile Networks (now part of Lucent Technologies), Polycom, Extreme Networks, Netro and Diva Communications.
About Brocade
Brocade's primary focus is to help customers build gigabit Fibre Channel fabrics, enabling them to optimize connections between data storage and enterprise servers, and to design high-performance, scalable data center backbones. Brocade is headquartered at 1901 Guadalupe Parkway in San Jose, CA 95131. For more information about Brocade, check out the company's Web site at brocadecomm.com, or contact Brenda Christensen, vice president, Marketing at 408/487-8123 or via email at info@brocadecomm.com .
About Norwest Venture Capital
Norwest Venture Capital actively manages $600 million in investments, and has raised more than $1 billion since inception. The firm consists of six partners with offices in Palo Alto, Boston and Minneapolis. Norwest has a broad private equity investment focus, including software and the Internet, data communications, telecommunications, semiconductors and subscriber-based services. Additional information on Norwest Venture Capital may be obtained via the World Wide Web at www.norwestvc.com or by calling 650/321-8000.
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