Fancy buying Brocade – again?
Fibre Channel and Ethernet networking company Brocade may be shopping itself around again, the The Wall Street Journal reports – again. Two years after reporting that Brocade had hired investment banker Qatalyst to find a buyer, the WSJ is at it again. According to people familiar with the matter, Brocade is up for sale, with …
Brocadewich.......
I think Juniper is the best bet. Cisco might not even be able to get a deal for all of Brocade through the anti-trust diligence, and I don't see Brocade agreeing to sell the Fiber Channel business to Cisco and try to make a go of it as an ethernet company.
IBM and HP are possibilities too.
I very much doubt that Juniper would want or need to purchase Brocade. They already have a very strong product in the QFabric that's a much more compelling product in the data centre than Brocade.
The ship left the harbour many moon cycles ago for Brocade to have made a decent prospect or decent value form a sale as your artcile rightly points out - who is left that would want them..?
However IBM are notorious for left field purchases, and BNT isnt exactly robust as a line of products which may be well compli8mented by Brocade and IBM then gets FC as a stable business to add to Mainframe and AS400............
EMC really isn't that left field. There have been rumors they're going to try pushing into the server space as well. I would say it's realistically:
Oracle
EMC
Juniper (QLogic would make far more sense from a product overlap perspective)
Huawei (doubtful the goverment would let them)
So pretty much Oracle.
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