Ruckus acquisition strengthens Brocade’s strategic presence: Andrew Coward

By ONKAR SHARMA 

Brocade is a strong networking player which is deeply entrenched in the service provider space globally and India. The company has over the years grown organically as well as inorganically. Brocade’s recently acquisition of Ruckus Wireless has flexed company’s muscle. Voice&Data spoke to Andrew Coward, VP of Service Provider Strategy at Brocade who was recently in India. Coward divulged how the company plans to move ahead in multiple markets including India.

How do you use acquisitions to strengthen your position?

We have increased our presence in the service space more specifically after Brocade acquired Foundry in 2008. The routing products are deployed in many large service providers and exchange products. Then the company acquired Vyatta in 2012 which gave us a new angle to compete and put us on a road toward software networking even before NFV came on the scene. The Vyatta products helped us to capitalize the business opportunities for virtual routing, virtual CPE, virtual firewall, and so on. Vyatta allowed us to start focusing on cloud service providers, and we began to build our larger service provider organization from there.

Most recently the company acquired Ruckus Wireless which has complemented Brocade’s enterprise networking portfolio. It has also strengthened Brocade’s strategic presence in the broader service provider space, with Ruckus’ market-leading Wi-Fi position.

As companies move to digitize their business, they need an underlying network architecture that supports business agility. This new IP architecture enables the network to become a platform for innovation and for developing, delivering, and securing new applications.

How does Ruckus Wireless empower Brocade’s position? What does it mean to customers?

Wireless is a critical access technology and the combination of Brocade and Ruckus creates a new type of pure-play networking company, with solutions spanning from the data center to the wireless network edge. Also, the acquisition is expected to accelerate cross-selling activities into the respective companies’ partner and customer bases, opening up new revenue opportunities for the combined company across a variety of verticals, including large enterprises, K-12 and higher education, government, hospitality, and service providers

The acquisition will strengthen our ability to tap emerging market opportunities around Internet of Things (IoT), Smart Cities, OpenGtm technology for in-building wireless, and LTE/Wi-Fi convergence. Brocade and Ruckus believe that the integration of Wi-Fi and the use of shared access or lightly licensed spectrum are critical to meeting the ever-growing demand for coverage, capacity, and consistency required for next-generation mobile services.

How do you see the importance of network automation for adoption of new technologies like IOT, big data and cloud?
The explosive growth in mobile data and all the new requirements around Internet of Things (IoT) and machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity is putting an extreme pressure on mobile networks. While service providers do have the knowledge as to whey they have to leverage cloud computing, network virtualization, and software networking technologies, it’s really difficult to take legacy operating systems from traditional routing manufactures, squeeze them into a server, and expect to run tens or hundreds of instances across that server infrastructure.

What’s your presence in India? Would you name some of your customers from India?

Brocade is very strong in India and has a long customer line. Here are the Brocade’s New IP Customers in India:
NxtGen: NxtGen Data Center & Cloud Services has become the latest IT service provider to adopt Brocade’s New IP networking infrastructure solutions to increase business growth and innovation. The new network infrastructure, comprising Brocade vRouters and VDX 6740T switches, will enable NxtGen to streamline enterprise cloud services fulfillment at its high-density data centers.

Tata Sky: Tata Skyis yet another customer which has been using Brocade FCX network switches for its call center operations. Now, as part of a broader upgrade at its key data center that also increases data storage system capacity from Brocade, the company is set to deploy an efficient and highly scalable Ethernet fabric based on Brocade VDX 6740 switches and Brocade VCS Fabric technology.

Videocon D2H: Brocade VDX 6720 switches were deployed at Videocon D2h’s new data center, which was specifically designed to support virtualization and later at the company’s two other facilities in a second phase

Micromax: Selected low-latency Brocade VDX 6740 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switches as the network foundation of the new data center due to the strength of Brocade VCS® Fabric technology, ease of configuration, operational automation, and cost-effective performance and scalability.

Micromax has been using Brocade solutions to accelerate application performance, increase application availability and improve security.

Besides, Brocade has a long list of customers including Polaris Financial Technology, Reliance BIG Animation and Omega Healthcare, among others.