LAN/WAN switch/router vendor Foundry has agreed to be acquired for $3 billion by Brocade, the storage powerhouse. CRN and Light Reading have the overall analysis. In terms of the enterprise communications market, this doesn't have a huge impact, but it's worth a note. Foundry has been an exhibitor at VoiceCon, and has teamed up on multi-vendor partnerships aimed at putting together the pieces of an enterprise communications infrastructure, as recently as this past spring, when they joined with Mitel and Sun in just such an announcement at Interop.
LAN/WAN switch/router vendor Foundry has agreed to be acquired for $3 billion by Brocade, the storage powerhouse. CRN and Light Reading have the overall analysis. In terms of the enterprise communications market, this doesn't have a huge impact, but it's worth a note. Foundry has been an exhibitor at VoiceCon, and has teamed up on multi-vendor partnerships aimed at putting together the pieces of an enterprise communications infrastructure, as recently as this past spring, when they joined with Mitel and Sun in just such an announcement at Interop.Among the ripple effects will be that, as CRN and Light Reading note, the new combination offers a broader challenge to Cisco than we've seen in quite some time. I don't see Cisco losing focus on UC even if they do face tougher competition in another end of their market.
Of course, it raises the interesting question about whether Brocade could decide to play in the enterprise real-time communications space. I've not heard Brocade's name come up in the discussions about who's going to acquire Siemens Enterprise, but if they're trying to build a broad-based infrastructure powerhouse to compete with Cisco across the board, Siemens might be a logical choice; its OpenScape Voice (formerly HiPath 8000) softswitch is tailor made for datacenter deployments of IP telephony call control.
You'd hardly expect Brocade to rapidly follow up a $3 billion acquisition, and its attendant corporate integration challenges, with another big acquisition and integration. But they're now a player in the LAN/WAN, and worth watching.
