Brocade strengthens India business

MUMBAI, INDIA: Brocade, the leader in data center networking solutions and services is increasing its direct presence in India.

Following the Foundry Networks’ acquisition last year, the company is foraying into the IP arena. On the sidelines of company’s customer network initiative, Ashis Guha, country head – India, Brocade said, “The acquisition of Foundry Networks in December 2008 has allowed Brocade to enter the IP arena.”

He said Brocade’s business strategy is largely based on OEM and channels partner like Sun, HP, Net Apps, IBM and others.

“In India, the company had started doing investments since 2000. We have a research and development center, which has the strong team of 120 staff along with 20 people on the business side. And we will continue to invest in people and by the year end, we will double our workforce to 280,” added Guha.

Though the company provides its solutions and services via OEM’s channel partners, it plans to set up its own distributors and retails partners to cater to its products in Indian market.

About the industry verticals, Guha informed that Brocade’s solutions and services are already used by verticals such as telecom and BFSI. Along with these verticals, IT, governments and SMEs are also the potential verticals in Indian market, he added.

Further, the company is highly emphasizing on interoperability and supports open architecture.

“We believe that enterprises cannot just rely only on one proprietor or proprietary solutions. And open architecture is very significant for success of any enterprise today,” commented Gerald Penaflor, senior enterprise director and regional head – South Asia Pacific/Korea, Brocade.

According to Penaflor, the enormous increase in data and traffic growth is impacting the network infrastructure, which is mainly caused by devices accessing rich media content, 3G networks and mobile platforms that require high computing power.

He suggested this situation will demand rearrangement of network infrastructures and will need robust extraordinary networks to support convergence.

Moreover, Brocade had launched convergence network adaptor (CNA) globally on Wednesday, which is designed to work with the existing network infrastructure. It has a storage area network (SAN) enabled encryption-based security support with fibre channels. The product will be available in India in next couple of months.