Brocade Gained 14% in WW Market Share of Modular FC Switching Space

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. has gained over 14 percentage points in worldwide market share of the modular Fibre Channel (FC) switching space and just under four percentage points of the fixed switching market globally since the previous quarter, according to the Dell’Oro Group in its 1Q09 SAN Report. Brocade’s closest competitor lost just under 10 percentage points of the overall worldwide FC switching market share in the same time period.

The Dell’Oro Group 1Q09 SAN Report states: “We conclude that the Brocade and Cisco results stem from both product and business issues. Brocade has a more advanced Fibre Channel product and is likely benefitting from Cisco’s channel conflict.”

Brocade believes these gains can be attributed to several factors, including Brocade’s leadership and continued commitment to the overall end-to-end networking market through continued product innovation. Brocade networking platforms, such as the multi-protocol Brocade DCX Backbone and the recently introduced Brocade DCX-4S, outperform and have lower overall operating costs than competitive products. Brocade was also the first to market with 8 Gbps switching technology that has contributed significantly to its leadership in the FC storage networking industry.

The dramatic market share increases may have also been influenced by Brocade’s deep commitment and investment in its wide ecosystem of storage industry partners, resulting in some of the best integrated and supported solutions available in the market today. In addition, Brocade’s pragmatic data center vision focuses on preserving customers’ existing investments in data center networking technologies, which has also helped increase customers’ loyalty to Brocade product and service offerings.

“To date, Brocade has invested more than $1 billion USD towards cooperative development and testing with its partners,” said Ian Whiting, senior vice president of worldwide sales for Brocade. “These investments help ensure that Brocade and its partners deliver best-in-class solutions to solve the most complex and pressing IT issues today and help define next-generation data center architectures.”