What has changed for Brocade?

The news that data center networking vendor Brocade is shopping itself around is startling, given where the company was just a little over a year ago.

Jim Duffy gathered industry speculation over this week’s buzz in the Wall Street Journal that Brocade may be looking for a buyer. Would IBM be interested? HP? Dell? Juniper? Even Oracle was mentioned.

It was only 15 months ago that Brocade purchased Foundry Networks. At the time, Brocade was billing itself as a contender in the data center, standing up to giants like Cisco that were building their presence in this new territory. But maybe Brocade and Foundry did just “jump into each other’s arms out of fright,” as one Network World blogger put it. Squeezed between Juniper on one side and Cisco on the other, perhaps they felt joining forces was key to their survival. If Brocade is in fact looking for a buyer, though, that means it needs a little more security than that.

I was a little sad to see Foundry gobbled up by Brocade, and I can’t imagine that what’s left of Foundry’s organization would do well as a small cog inside an even larger machine, if Brocade ends up acquired.

It may be possible that Brocade won’t find a buyer, or at least won’t find an offer that it finds acceptable. What happens then? Can Brocade go it alone? If it is in fact shopping itself around, the leaders apparently don’t think so. While Foundry managed to survive and thrive in a market dominated by giants Cisco and HP, perhaps the data center networking area is different.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.