Brocade invests $100 million in Asia Pacific’s IT industry to Accelerate Ethernet fabric adoption and migration to cloud architectures

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Brocade announced a number of investments including a $100 million evaluation program designed to enable customers in the Asia Pacific region to quickly deploy Ethernet fabrics as the foundation for highly virtualized data centers. Brocade believes that the IT trends driving transformation in this region make it prime to adopt this fundamental technology to migrate to private, public and hybrid cloud computing architectures.

Ethernet fabric is a new category of networking technology that is purpose-built for virtualization and cloud-optimized data centers. Brocade’s Ethernet fabric solution is powered by Brocade VCS technology and available through the Brocade® VDX 6720 Data Center Switch. In December, Brocade was the industry’s first company to deliver products to market.

The Asia Pacific region presents a vibrant market opportunity for virtualization and cloud-computing related technology investments. According to industry research, the market for virtualization and cloud computing-related expenditures in Asia Pacific is expected to grow from $2.5 billion this year to more than $6.7 billion (USD) by 2016*.

“Brocade intends to compete aggressively for the virtualization and cloud computing business in Asia Pacific because this region is so important to our company’s long-term growth strategy,” said Mike Klayko, CEO of Brocade. “We believe we have a highly differentiated offering in the Ethernet fabric space that is based on a 15-year heritage of technical innovation and experience in building the world’s most mission-critical data center networks.”

Investment components include the following:

• Eligible Brocade customers in Asia Pacific have access to a $100 million product-evaluation program that enables them to test Ethernet fabric and other cloud-infrastructure products and support from Brocade at no cost with the option to purchase directly from Brocade or a preferred Brocade partner;

• A series of executive-level roundtable meetings aimed at regional IT executives and CIOs to be hosted at the Brocade campus in Silicon Valley. These executive forums will feature distinguished speakers and panelists from the leading Silicon Valley companies who are focused on the cloud and virtualization markets;

• A technology workshop series called “How to Reach the Cloud with Brocade Ethernet Fabrics” designed to provide network architects and administrators technical information on how to build virtualized data centers through reliable and scalable cloud-optimized networks. Brocade will host these half-day workshops at no cost to attendees in multiple countries and cities starting in April.

These additional investments augment the significant capital, resources and headcount Brocade has recently invested in the region. Brocade has nearly doubled the number of employees throughout Asia Pacific in the last 10 months. Brocade also has an active and growing R&D presence, IT services and back-office support in key, strategic locations. It also maintains a large manufacturing footprint in the region both directly and through strategic partnerships.

“Growing a business requires continued investment especially in a region as competitive as Asia Pacific,” said Deb Dutta, vice president and general manager of Asia Pacific for Brocade. “These investments demonstrate how strategic we view the opportunities in this region and reflect our confidence about our ability to grow our business in core and emerging markets here.”