You know, for all the talk this industry does about “enabling experiences” and “driving lifestyles” and “changing the way we… do really everything,” a company’s success or failure really comes down to its ability to develop and sell products. That’s right. It’s not sexy, it’s not flashy, but it’s true. Mapping customers’ needs to rack-mountable, blinking, port-filled boxes that allow them (as businesses) to focus on their core business rather than those boxes, is where the rubber meets the road, and where I think Brocade does a particularly outstanding job. 

Take, for example, the Brocade DCX Backbone, launched in January 2008, a time at which Brocade and Cisco roughly split the market 50/50 in any given quarter when the quantitative analysts such as IDC, Synergy and Dell'Oro tallied the numbers. The DCX gave customers clear value, in an outstandingly unsexy way (8Gbps Fibre Channel port density, among other things), and, as the fastest ramping product in Brocade history, drove Brocade to SAN market leadership, with the split now at about 75/25 – advantage Brocade.   

The acquisition of Foundry last year put a spotlight on Brocade’s plans for IP/Ethernet integration and proliferation, and subsequent announcements with large partners such as IBM and Dell re-branding portions of the IP line and selling them as their own have gotten a lot of attention. We have great plans for that area of business, and the synergies it enables with our SAN line, but we’ve never taken our eye off the ball when it comes to the SAN.

Tuesday’s announcement of two new modular solutions helps make the point.  The new Brocade FX8-24 Extension Blade -- designed to connect two or more data centers to enhance business continuity and disaster recovery -- and the Brocade Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) 10-24 Blade -- for server I/O consolidation in the data center. We also announced fixed switch solutions for extension, the Brocade 7800 Extension Switch and FCoE/CEE, the Brocade 8000 Switch.

Each of these products is industry-leading in its capabilities and meets a true market need, as evidenced by the fact that we also expanded the ecosystem of partners who have qualified and will resell the FCoE 10-24, the industry’s first modular FCoE/CEE solution. Dell, HDS, HP, NetApp, and Sun will make the blade generally available to customers over the next few months.

Speaking of partners, we also announced that we are expanding our Alliance Partner Network programs significantly by empowering our ever-growing roster of value-added resellers to resell approved support and professional services packages to end-users. The programs are designed to help make our channel partners that much more profitable. A no-brainer you say, sure, but it’s in direct contrast with Cisco, whose VARs have publicly raised concerns about Cisco squeezing more margins from them in both product and services.

According to a recent report from AT&T, customers intend to prioritize business continuity and security solutions in terms of IT projects that will get funded over the next 12 months as companies prepare for an economic turnaround. The data center-to-data center connectivity solutions from Brocade are absolutely essential to effective business continuity and disaster recovery plans by enabling companies to replicate data and digital files over high-performance metro-area and wide-area networks on a real or near-real time basis.

This is real stuff. This is what keeps everyone from CIOs to IT managers up at night, and, as a result, keeps us focused on the same. So while we can all talk about “Transmogrifying Virtually Enabled Cloud Convergence” until our marketing folks pass out with glee (and we’ve done our share with the Extraordinary Networks Tour), in the end, it all comes down to the bits and bytes, silicon and sheet metal that make up the STUFF that we actually sell so our customers can keep on doing what it is they do.

And that’s where I think we win.