The phenomenal growth of the healthcare industry over the last few years in Asia has received plenty of attention in local and global markets. To meet the surging demand for high-quality healthcare, coupled with an increasing need to conform to global standards in delivery and management, healthcare service providers across most developed and developing economies of the region are quickly upgrading their IT infrastructures.

I recently saw a couple of healthcare studies from Springboard Research, where it estimated that the total Healthcare IT market in Asia (excluding Japan) is expected to hit US$4.8 billion this year. If the healthcare industry has been saving for the rainy day, then guess what … it’s raining hard!

Back in the mid 1990’s, before someone coined the term “medical tourism,” that concept was known as the international patient business. Travelling internationally to seek healthcare in Asia is very much a norm among the wealthy in the developing nations! What has changed is that demand has now cascaded to include the very large middle class in those countries! Today, we are beginning to see innovative offerings such as medical treatment and procedures on board cruise ships, using on-board facilities that enable patients to recuperate while cruising and relaxing at sea!

Demand drives competition and competition drives differentiation and therefore innovation. Developed nations in Asia and the healthcare providers within them have greatly increased their spending on technologies for medical and diagnostic equipment, care management and patient records, and are now investing in value-added applications to support this IT infrastructure, regulatory requirements and client privacy. Such was the case for Asian Hospital and Medical Center in the Philippines that recently adopted an AMALGA Hospital Information System from Microsoft to support the conversion from paper-driven manual processes to a fully automated environment—to ensure accuracy of data capture, lessen manual transcription in the transfer of patient data and minimize errors in medical results.

Even after patients return home from treatment in many facilities, physicians can continue to communicate with them electronically. For instance, hospitals in Singapore can upload medical-grade images and procedure records as required for continued care and treatment in their home country. By seamlessly linking electronic health record systems (EHRs) to share information across a broad network of providers, this approach provides international collaboration known as “patients beyond borders.” This type of collaboration depends on reliable, high-performance IP networking solutions that Brocade is very well positioned to deliver today!

Brocade – Enabling Healthcare Connectivity and Data Center Efficiency
Any hospital network infrastructure is only as robust as its weakest link. A reliable, distributed, scalable and secured wired and wireless network infrastructure is required for connecting a hospital campus to a wide variety of devices, including laptops, workstations, nurses call stations, equipment tracking for patient diagnostics and administrative/record-keeping functions.

Brocade, in partnership with Motorola, ShoreTel, IBM Security and McAfee, is ready to help healthcare providers meet these requirements while aggressively reducing their Operating expenses. Brocade has a proven history of providing high-quality network infrastructure in thousands of mission-critical data centers around the world. As a result, it can leverage that experience to help healthcare providers scale up to the stringent performance and security expectations of modern medical facilities!

In my January blog I provided a high-level overview of the technology at Brocade’s new state-of-the-art San Jose campus. Now, I’d like to focus on a specific area of that infrastructure, one that’s critical to Brocade and to its customers: the network.

We began mapping our requirements about a year and a half ago. The goal was to design a high-speed, secure, scalable, and reliable IP network foundation – one that would deliver the right mix of functionality, performance, scalability, security, and cost savings. Wherever possible, we wanted to leverage our own capabilities and products.

In fact, the SAN and IP networks at the new campus will rely on Brocade products exclusively for the fast and reliable connectivity we need to serve the ever-growing demands of business applications. To limit downtime during data migration, Brocade will use its SAN/Fibre Channel products to complete an 8 Gbps Fibre Channel connection between the SAN infrastructures serving the current buildings and the new campus. Brocade NetIron XMR Series routers will link the existing and new IP networks at 20 Gbps of bandwidth with virtually no latency.

The network transport connecting the Brocade campus and vendor-neutral co-location facilities will travel over a dense Wavelength Division-Multiplexing (WDM) network with optical protection, for uninterrupted, high-bandwidth connectivity to the outside world. To provide best-in-class content delivery, we’ll use the Brocade ServerIron ADX platform.

WAN connectivity between Brocade and partner networks will leverage inexpensive Ethernet and allow us to connect directly to service providers and business partners with cost-effective, scalable bandwidth via co-location facilities. This gives us the flexibility to engage as needed, match capacity to demand, and pay as we go.

The network core and data center at the new campus will use Brocade NetIron MLX technology. Because our technology eliminates the need for the aggregation layer in a traditional network configuration, we can connect the network edge directly to the core. This will greatly reduce capital outlay and simplify operations. It also lessens requirements for space, power, and cooling for lower total cost of ownership.

We’ll further reduce our space, power, and cooling requirements in our wiring closets by installing Brocade FastIron CX access switches at the network edge. Essentially, we’re looking at every opportunity to do more at a lower overall cost, and to do it better.

Finally, we’re leveraging our OEM relationship with Motorola to build a next-generation Wireless LAN (WLAN) at the campus. Basically, the entire facility will be a Wi-Fi hotspot, which will help maximize productivity by allowing employees to seamlessly connect to business applications, regardless of their location on campus.

With just 10 weeks remaining until move-ins start, there’s still a lot to do. When it’s finished, the new campus will be served by a world-class converged IPv6-ready network offering a secure, scalable, and robust voice and data platform for assured rich multimedia content delivery. The network will serve VoIP, wireless, video, and Web services, and support future applications such as Fixed Mobile Convergence and Unified Communications (UC). We’re excited about our momentum, and I’m pleased to report that we’re on schedule.

With more than 12 years in existence, Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) isn’t a new technology, but it also isn’t a “table stakes” feature found in every network. MPLS was originally created for large service providers to speed up the flow of network traffic and ultimately simplify manageability. As with many new technologies, MPLS certainly wasn’t cheap when it was first introduced (in truth, MPLS prices were artificially inflated). And it was initially perceived as being complicated to set up and refine…ironic considering that it was designed to improve and simplify the network infrastructure. As with most technologies, MPLS eventually evolved into a solution that has become relatively inexpensive and straightforward to install. Even with all these improvements, however, there is still a lingering perception that MPLS is costly and that only large service providers have the need, know-how, and deep pockets to install it and achieve its full range of benefits.

The fact of the matter is that MPLS is flexible, fast, and cost-effective. It enables network segmentation and quality of service for latency-sensitive applications such as business-class voice and high-quality video. Today, Brocade has many enterprise customers that are taking advantage of these “service provider” capabilities and beginning their own corporate implementations, especially in distributed enterprises. Industry analysts predict double-digit growth for Carrier Ethernet in the coming years, and Brocade is dedicated to helping carriers transition to the advantages of the higher bandwidth and lower cost that Ethernet provides. Brocade Ethernet solutions have a proven track record in service provider networks—with more than 5000 Brocade routers deployed worldwide in carrier networks and Brocade solutions managing traffic in more than 70 MPLS deployments.

Bringing all this to reality, the Brocade NetIron CER 2000 Router, our newest router offering, provides high performance and scalable MPLS in an ultra-compact 1U form factor…a virtually unheard of combination until now. Demand for this new product has been startlingly high, especially for providers that are driving MPLS closer to the edge of their networks, delivering video over IP multicast and Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS).

From an industry perspective, the NetIron CER 2000 is the only router of its size that offers 10 Gigabit Ethernet and is priced at just a fraction of the cost of traditional cumbersome MPLS routers. In fact, it has twice the routing capacity, offers 33 percent space savings and 66 percent power savings, and provides almost three times better forwarding performance at half the price of comparable solutions—making it ideal for cost-effective cloud computing, for instance. These numbers equal not only CapEx and OpEx cost savings but also translate into the flexibility to innovate and deliver the types of services customers have been reading about for years but could never order. The result? An increasingly bright future for MPLS in both service provider and distributed enterprise environments.

Here are some comments from me on Brocade's Q3 FY 2009 financial results, which we announced on Thursday, Aug. 20.

Mike

Brocade is known for a couple of things – building Extraordinary Networks, and developing and maintaining close partnerships with other companies in ways that benefit customers  beyond the benefits that they would receive if Brocade “made it all here.” One of the areas in which we partner closely with other vendors to deliver a complete solution is campus wireless access, or WiFi.  Our focus on cross-compatibility not only among our own products but with many other vendors makes our combined offering here stronger and more flexible than single-vendor solutions.   With the increasingly distributed enterprise, the benefits of a combined WiFi offering are absolutely clear.

The driver for the growth in enterprise wireless   to this point is primarily due to convenience; the increased needs of a mobile enterprise. Moving forward, one of the major trends is that  wireless  is becoming an integral part of a networking infrastructure as opposed to something that is really built for convenience and casual use. This is particularly important as the new wireless standard built in 802.11n begin to emerge, as opposed to the past standards – 802.11a, and 802.11b/g. – 802.11n can now carry traffic comparable to your wired local area network speed, which is 100 megabits per second (Mbps) and above while enhancing the robustness and range of the wireless signal. So potentially users can actually leverage wireless access to access mission critical applications and access data which normally would be too bulky or too large to be downloaded through the legacy wireless technology. With 802.11n some organizations and enterprise may actually choose to bypass the wiring of the building and go completely wireless.

As this trend increases, we will continue to see customers source and fund the deployment of wired and wireless networks at the same time, vs. doing what they have traditionally done and  treating them separately. In this context, it would seem better for them to get the entire solution from a single vendor, preferably with unique value-added functionalities – It is. It might also seem that it would be better to have the entire solution developed by that vendor –  It’s not.

Vendors who would offer you their, and only their wares from end to end in the development of a local area network are not necessarily selling you the best products for your needs, but, potentially, products that meet the lowest requirements of the stated need at the highest margins for themselves.  The Brocade approach, on the other hand, is to continuously survey the landscape for the best available technology, regardless of the source, establish its interoperability with all of your various network components, build strong relationships with the vendors who supply it and deploy it at the best possible cost/performance ratio. This strategy is enabled by the fact that we do not need to subsidize other areas of the company by charging you more for portions of an end-to-end solution than the market demands, under the guise and per the assertion that, “If we make it all it must be the best.” In fact, we have an increasing number of customers who did buy into that, and who were greatly disappointed later, and who are now turning to us for a complete replacement of parts of, if not all of their network infrastructure.

While we are happy to help in that regard, we’d rather work with them to get it right the first time – selecting from best-of-breed vendors, working to ensure interoperability and availability in IP networks with the same intensive processes we always have in the data center, and extending our partnership beyond our technology partners and to the end users themselves.

On Tuesday, April 28 we announced an expanded OEM agreement with IBM that will allow IBM to rebrand and sell the Brocade enterprise IP networking family of products through the IBM global sales force and authorized IBM Business Partners. Here are my thoughts on this important agreement in a short video I shot recently.