Past couple of months has brought many news in the IT market , first Oracle buys Sun and now some very long term partners are breaking up , Big Blue ( IBM ) and Cisco are breaking up and IBM is excepted to resell Ethernet switching equipment from Brocade . IBM will rebrand and sell Brocade enterprise IP networking equipment through its own sales force.
Cisco has also adopted the same strategy some time back and started to build and sell its own data centers as a complete solutions competing with its partners IBM and HP. Cisco’s step to sell data center has already triggered a breakup.
The Data Center strategy of Cisco has came as a boon to Brocade and instead of being a much smaller rival to Cisco came up as a partner to IBM , Brocade CEO Michael Klayko admitted Cisco’s move have gave them the required boost and opportunity however according to him they were in talks long before “We started talking with IBM well over a year ago about this”. IBM has been already re branding and reselling Brocade’s storage area networking equipment.
Over the past Cisco rivals has been startup’s or much smaller companies which neither have the required technology nor the sales force to compete with Cisco . Some rivals have got small home networking share but none till date has made a big dent in Cisco networking market share.Even competitors like Nortel were not able to put a blow to Cisco networking and switching business.
But will Cisco new move of making partners , rival’s will ignite the networking and switching business and may impact Cisco in a big way , There are some strong indications coming like HP Procurve is already addressing low end markets and accounts for 10 percent of the market share in just two years . Now Brocade is trying to target the high end market and its partnership with IBM may come as a big blow to Cisco. Brocade has already acquired a long term competitor of Cisco “Foundary Networks” targeting high end market. Foundary has known to be acquainted with the technology to hit the high end market but was lacking the sales force which they will gain with the help of IBM deal with Brocade.
This move will surely heat up the switching and networking market and may bring a blow to Cisco’s long term leadership in the market.
Good Article Saurabh..
Just one suggestion, kindly run a grammar check before posting. I know the spirit of what you are trying to say in communicated even otherwise.. but it just adds to the credibility and makes it more professional..
Cheers!!