OK, so typical office banter after returning from travel:

“How was the show?”

“Oh, you know, same as usual, glad I went…”

Well not this year! At least not for me nor for those who met with Brocade during EMC World. In fact, there was such a difference in Brocade’s overall experience at the event that this year and last might be compared to listening to an AC/DC concert, with last year being through my stereo system with pretty good subwoofers and this year a front row seat with all the energy and ear-shattering you would expect. So it was with EMC World 2010.

Last year it seemed a lot, if not most of the discussions were focused on VCE, the partnership between EMC, Cisco and VMWare.  This year, the volume was turned way down on that. As you may have seen in the story named “EMC-Brocade 10 Gigabit Ethernet deal raises questions for Cisco,” EMC announced it would be selling Brocade IP/Ethernet solutions. This not only obviously benefits Brocade, but gives customers the choice they continue to demand, especially in a time when vertically integrated solutions such as Cisco’s UCS are at that point in the hype cycle where people are still saying, “what?”

In fact, if called upon to name a theme for the discussions I had (from the roughly 90 meetings that six of us from Brocade had in three days), it would definitely be “Choice.” That’s what people want, and why they stay with Brocade.

Beyond that even, the event was a blast! I can’t say it would have been fun for the whole family, necessarily, but for guys like me who have clocked quite a few miles, this event seemed to rise above most others. In addition to the fantastic discussions we had with customers and partners, we tacked on a night party at the House of Blues

Jointly drove a very successful Be Next campaign with EMC

And I even made it to a Red Sox game!

By the way, people who enjoy American baseball but question the entertainment value of cricket based on the game’s length and complexity must enjoy watching paint dry and grass grow. No offense, of course, as I know there’s two sides to every story. However, I do understand the value of enjoying hot dogs and a cold one right at your seat vs. breaking for tea near the cricket field – so I guess everything evens out.

On May 3, the first group of employees moved into the new Brocade San Jose campus and we expect full occupancy by July 23. From a technical and operational standpoint, this is a remarkable achievement made possible by hundreds of thousands of hours of hard work and dedication by our employees and project partners. Through collaboration and creative work-arounds during a very rainy winter, we were able to overcome numerous obstacles and stay on schedule.

But what I am most proud of is how the campus embodies Brocade’s innovation and thought leadership that will contribute to a great workplace and an industry-leading showcase of networking technologies and best practices:

• State-of-the-art Data Center: Our innovative new data center boasts advanced energy-efficient systems and best-of-breed technologies.

• Sustainability:  We are focused on improving the sustainability in our products, facilities and operations—three key areas where we can have a positive impact on managing greenhouse gases. The campus utilizes energy monitoring/reduction systems, water-saving systems, solar panels, high use of recycled materials, environmentally friendly materials, and other strategies that we expect to earn us a coveted Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold rating for the buildings.

• Volunteering: Giving back to the community is part of the Brocade culture. We developed the Brocade Day of Service program to coordinate volunteer service for every employee on their move day. The first two move groups have already completed projects at the Second Harvest Food Bank, Friends of Guadalupe River Park & Gardens, and Resource Area for Teachers (RAFT).

• Amenities: A full-service café, coffee bar, expanded game room and fitness center are just a few of the amenities we’ve designed into the campus. Construction on the adjacent retail center and Target are underway.

This year Brocade was named one of the Fortune's “100 Best Companies To Work For,” and just last week we were ranked the No. 1 Best Place to Work in the Bay Area by the San Francisco Business Times. We believe that this new campus will make Brocade an even more rewarding place of employment.

But our work isn’t done yet. The full potential of the campus won’t be realized until all of our employees move in and make it their home. Buildings and fixtures are just the skeleton of a company. Our employees are who define the spirit and culture of Brocade, developing their own ideas and innovations, finding new ways to leverage the campus. Bringing together all 2000+ of our Bay Area employees in a single campus will help us continue our pace of innovation.

Within the last year or so we have announced agreements with IBM, Dell and this week with EMC to sell our data center IP, converged networking and application delivery products, adding a significant amount of breadth to our existing storage networking partnerships. From my standpoint, this serves as serious validation that not only did Brocade read the tea leaves correctly when the decision was made to acquire Foundry, but now our top-tier OEM partners also see the need to adapt to the changing IT landscape that is moving toward open standards, convergence and cloud architecture from an end-to-end solution perspective.

Tier 1 application and wide-scale virtualization deployments along with the move toward cloud architecture are driving convergence, flat network topology and high-density 10G Ethernet switching adoption. The new agreement with EMC that we announced at EMC World this week signifies the evolution of our long-standing, strategic partnership with EMC to meet this customer demand. This is also a validation that customers want standards-based open solutions where they have choice. This partnership allows our joint customers to reap the benefits of decades of combined, proven experience we have jointly in delivering Ethernet, storage, and now converged networking solutions. Our goal is to help simplify our customers’ operations, reduce costs and increase business agility.

Over the next decade, improving application performance and protecting data integrity pose some of the biggest challenges in the industry. Brocade already has a deep set of expertise around application optimization and the ability to scale and maintain application performance across a diverse environment. Couple this strength with our shared vision with EMC to drive IT efficiency, simplicity and business flexibility, and you have a winning combination for customers today and as we plan for the network of the future.

I love analogies because, for me at least they make it a lot easier to understand how something works. So here is my proposition: for many years, businesses both large and small have invested in networks that have become the circulatory systems for their business information. Just like in the human body, when the blood stops flowing well, the patient gets weak or worse. The network works the same way.

For instance, how did you feel the last time your network failed to serve up the information you wanted? Probably the same as me: not so great. When data and communications stop moving, organizational effectiveness declines—sometimes very rapidly.

At Brocade, we believe that a well-planned and well-supported network can allow a business to run the equivalent of the corporate marathon. In contrast, a poorly supported network is akin to living with heart disease, which can make it difficult to walk around the block or even up the stairs.

So take a look at your own personal lifestyle and ask: What does it take to keep yourself healthy in today’s fast-paced environment? We each choose a path that fits our own individual needs. While I may like to work out at the gym and get my healthcare from a large HMO, you may prefer to play tennis and rely on your local family-practice doctor.

Ask ten of your best friends and you will get ten different answers on what works best for each of them. The point is that there is no one right answer as long as we are doing something to take care of ourselves. However, when your chosen medical providers need assistance on a problem, they turn to a specialist with deep expertise and specialized medical training.

When it comes to supporting networks—whether they are in the core of your business, connecting your workforce, or at your ISP—Brocade understands everyone’s needs are unique. We also believe that our customers should be able to select and work with the IT professionals of their choice—making sure they deploy a network that best fits their unique business needs.

No matter whom your preferred network partner is—whether it is a global integrator, server manufacturer, or your trusted local VAR—Brocade stands behind them to provide the networking support they need to meet your most critical requirements. Brocade has a proven track record of supporting its partners and fully understands that making them successful is the key to our customers’ success. And that success hinges on freedom of choice.

In an emergency, just like the heart specialist who steps in to ensure that your blood keeps flowing, Brocade support experts stand ready to keep your network traffic circulating to help ensure that your business stays healthy for a long time.

When you or your partner need help onsite to help solve a problem just remember Brocade still makes house calls.

In previous entries I described how the network infrastructure at the new Brocade campus in San Jose will support the company’s business needs today and in the future. Up to this point I focused mainly on hardware. Now, I want to talk about one of the many customer-facing solutions the infrastructure will deliver, specifically, MyBrocade. This new Web portal is a one-stop shop that, through continuous interaction, will enable us to better support our customers and extend our reach into new target markets.

Envisioned as an enhanced Internet framework to facilitate more direct dialog with a diverse and evolving set of customers, partners and vendors, this project has had strong executive support and involvement. Other goals for MyBrocade include increased brand awareness, reduced operational costs and enhanced Web capabilities to facilitate marketing, sales, fulfillment and support processes. Originally started in 2008, MyBrocade became fully operational in April of this year.

The MyBrocade portal is a framework that aggregates a wealth of Brocade content, resources and tools. Customers have real-time access to a multitude of self-help resources on a 24×7 basis. All features on MyBrocade leverage a common registration and authentication process. The single search engine, common navigation/personalization structure and global content delivery network enable a truly seamless user experience.

The enhanced Web portal offers customers and others numerous benefits. For instance, users can personalize content by selecting the specific information they want to receive. Their requests give us important insight into their interests, business needs, challenges and communication preferences – insight that helps Brocade build better products and provide them with superior service.

MyBrocade promises to be a leading example of how Internet technology can help grow and scale the business, while realizing cost efficiencies through the automation of internal processes like sales and support enablement, software posting, content publishing and campaign management. To maximize our investment, we leveraged virtualization, SaaS and reusability/SOA. And, we did so with a singular focus on quality.

An initiative of this scale and complexity required a world-class team and exceptional collaboration. Members of IT, Marketing, Operations, Technical Publications and Customer Support worked together to make it happen. We replaced inflexible and high-maintenance legacy tools with a flexible, secure and scalable platform. To ensure a world-class user experience, we engaged the best industry researchers and carefully selected the vendors and tools we used. Most importantly, we conducted lengthy and detailed consultations with customers and partners to make sure that we were providing exactly what they needed.

Today, we are just scratching the surface of possibilities with MyBrocade. Beginning next month, users will be able to create and manage support cases online, and obtain access to self-help knowledge base tools. In addition, the Brocade Web Portal team is currently prioritizing several functional enhancements, among them mobile access localization and multimedia supports. I invite you to learn more by either signing up for your own MyBrocade account or taking a quick tour at http://www.brocade.com/company/mybrocade_demohome.html.

Dealing with a critical situation, or “crit sit” is a nightmare for customers and IT vendors alike. A failed piece of equipment or software application, whether for technical or human reasons, generates a considerable amount of disruption, discord and finger pointing. Fortunately, an increasing number of our customers are either replacing their “legacy” (read: other vendor's) networks with our gear or expanding their Brocade deployments because crit sits are a rarity at Brocade.

My good friends in Brocade engineering have done wonders over the years by designing quality and reliability into every product we sell.  In recent times, as networks have grown to a size and level of complexity we would have considered unthinkable a few years ago, the boffins in R&D have surpassed themselves by developing an array of “RAS” capabilities that are unmatched in the industry. RAS stands for Reliability, Availability and Serviceability. It's a term used to describe the way companies diagnose, troubleshoot and fix problems when they occur in their products - or preferably before they occur. Brocade RAS shows up in the form of software tools that enable you to identify -- with pinpoint accuracy -- the root cause of problems affecting the performance of the network.  The level of sophistication designed into these tools is the IT equivalent of being able to locate the group of microscopic human cells causing that nagging back pain you've had for the past few days, being able to zap the cells, and then getting back to normal....get it, "back" to normal?  OK – so I'm corny and the example is a bit of stretch – but you understand the analogy.

Being a networking company, Brocade and our gear touch almost every other element of IT at a customer site.  We're in the data path of each piece of digital information traversing the network, shaking hands with almost every application, PC, printer, server, storage device, gateway and firewall out there. You name it, we interface with it. As a result it is not uncommon for the network to be found “guilty until proven innocent” when IT systems break or even just slow down.  Hence the need for networking companies like us to have super smart tools buried deep in the operating system layer of our products - tools that can quickly and efficiently spot the offending device, application or cable, deal with it (a.k.a. shut it down, open up an alternative path, or fix it) and get everything up and running as quickly as possible. When that process fails, crit sits occur.

Crit sits are complex and often emotionally charged situations. While usually everyone is focused on the right thing i.e. helping each other to fix the problem, sometimes things can become fraught as patience wears thin, the clock is ticking and the CEO can't get access to email. I am proud to say that Brocade has developed not only the tools but the right attitude in dealing with these situations. By focusing on the best outcome for the customer and using the tools we have developed to spot and fix business-affecting issues, we are able to resuscitate the heart and lungs of the company - its network. From a sales perspective, there’s no better claim to make.

Blog post by: Ian.Whiting, SVP of Worldwide Sales & Marketing

Where am I? Clue – travelling at 160KM/hr with Bernhard, one of our top sales reps, who does a great job shuttling me between meetings at warp speed. Am I late for my appointment with one of Europe’s leading CIOs to explain how Brocade can transform his network to keep up with today’s “traffic” (pun intended) and tomorrow’s convergence? No, we’re just on the Autobahn in Frankfurt and this is how they roll.

Like the Autobahn beneath us, IT outsourcing is hot and quickly ramping in Germany. Three of my meetings in Germany were with companies who are in the business of offering managed and outsourced services to banks, airlines and travel companies. There is an outsourcing resurgence here and elsewhere in Europe as more and more companies do the math and realize IT stuff is expensive to buy, complex and hard to manage. These IT services company execs remind me of why Bernhard drives a BMW to our meetings. In this environment, like the enterprise data center, performance, reliability and the ability to negotiate fast turns, matter. These execs and other open-minded CIOs demand ultra high-performance links between servers and their data storage. They demand mission-critical levels of reliability and uptime (something we think we know a bit about given that 90 percent of the Fortune 1000 companies run their storage systems on Brocade SAN gear). And most recently they want to know how your gear will help them handle tricky curves like Cloud Computing up ahead. The truth of the matter is that no other networking company on the planet is better equipped to deliver a truly open standards-based, highly integrated and top performing network infrastructure that is the foundation for all data center virtualization and cloud computing architecture. You will be hearing a lot more from us on this topic this year.

Recently merging onto the Brocade ramp is John McHugh. John just joined us as our CMO (that’s the head honcho of marketing for those less familiar with these acronyms). John is what my American colleagues call an “athlete”. As it turns out John is a bit of fitness buff from what I hear – but that’s not what I’m referring to. John holds the reputation of being the engine and driver behind HP Procurve. We are delighted to have John on our team and I am very confident that, similar to what he also already proven in the networking industry, he will continue to set the pace for others to follow. If you see a crowd at the next networking trade show – look closely – it will probably be John explaining the twists and turns of this industry that he knows like the back of his hand.

Well, here’s my exit. Until then…..don’t try handling this road without an experienced driver. Call Brocade – we’ve got the map you need to navigate the next generation of networking highway.