Users of products from Brocade Communications Systems and
McData said that they are worried about the amount of overlap
between the two companies' product lines now that
Brocade has acquired McData for $713
million. The users also said they are worried about
interoperability issues.
Andrew Madsen, director of IT for the Harley Davidson Motor Co.,
said his shop has been using Brocade but is in the process of
replacing it with Cisco
Systems switches "because we're a Cisco shop in
other aspects of our company" such as telephones. Madsen also
said he hoped the fusing of its two main competitors into one
would "keep Cisco on their toes."
But as far as Madsen is concerned, McData "never really entered
into the equation," because of interoperability problems.
"Hopefully [with this acquisition] it will be easier to integrate
systems. McData has been causing everyone a lot of grief with their
interoperability mode -- they've been stuck at 32 domain IDs
(switches) that can be attached to their director in
interoperability mode. Hopefully that'll disappear if Brocade
completely folds products together."
Hal Weiss, IS systems engineer for Baptist Memorial Healthcare,
said he also uses Brocade almost exclusively and went away from
McData years ago when it began to make a move away from EMC. He has
avoided McData at almost all costs -- where it's not Brocade in his
shop with his Hewlett-Packard storage, it's Cisco.
"McData will tell you they don't have interoperability issues,
but they do," Weiss said. Technically, Weiss said, McData's
i10,000k director is a better product than Brocade's directors, and
McData has better high-end products in general. But nonetheless,
Weiss does not want to have to rip out and replace any of the
switches in his environment.
However, Weiss said, he will need to buy more switches in the
next year. At that point, he would be happy to buy a McData product
offered by Brocade -- provided interoperability issues, which he
said could also be not just a limitation on ports but
incompatibilities between McData's management protocols and those
of the other switch suppliers -- had been addressed. "And frankly,
they would have to prove it to me."
If those problems can't be addressed, Weiss said, "then I would
be looking at Cisco. It would be a real infrastructure change, but
it would be one of those things that would make you re-evaluate
your investment."
Tom Becchetti, who asked that his company, a financial services
firm, not be named, said he uses both Brocade and McData and was
more sanguine about the possibility of introducing McData high-end
products into Brocade's offerings.
"I still think that McData has the better high-end products and
better directors," Becchetti said. Becchetti, who uses 6,140
directors from McData, does not have any interoperability problems.
"I don't interconnect them -- they are separate fabrics. I try to
keep my environment as simple as possible."
As for integration between the two companies, Becchetti said,
"depending on how they integrate, they could make it really great
or really ruin it. It's a teeter-totter they're on."
Will FICON survive?
In particular, Becchetti said he worries about the
FICON-enabled switches from McData that he
uses to connect his mainframes to a Fibre network. "It's a
comfort to us that McData has been doing FICON for 15 years --
if they got rid of that product line, that would probably be
enough to sway us toward Cisco," he said. "But Brocade, we're
hoping, is almost certainly smarter than that."
Another McData user, the director of IT for a large retail
company based in the Southwest, who asked not to be identified,
said he is not so sure Brocade will do the right thing. In fact, he
sees a dire prior example in McData's purchase of CNT, which made a
superior director called UltraNet Multiservice Director (UMD). "I
don't know that there's anything left of it," he said. "What they
kept is the services side."
The user said Brocade does have a gap in the high-end director
space that McData could fill, but other than that, this McData user
worries that McData's products could be going away completely.
"McData and Brocade both have a full range of offerings," he said.
"I can't really see what advantage this merger will give either
company, to be honest."
Most of the users said they could at least see the rationale for
the deal in terms of its industry-focused side, especially the need
to compete with Cisco. Weiss also said he thought it could sweeten
deals with original equipment manufacturers (OEM), if Brocade drops
prices to compete with Cisco, but that he's not sure that benefit
would extend to customers.
"McData has been courting us for some time," said Rich DeBrino,
chief information officer of both Compass Health and wholly-owned
IT consulting company, Advances in Technology (AIT), both of which
use Brocade switches as part of a largely HP infrastructure. "It's
a decent product, but we felt Brocade was a more stable company
with a better installed base. Putting them together, though, will
help create a better competitor for Cisco."
In this market, DeBrino said, it might actually be better to
have fewer products and competitors. "If you think about it, this
kind of switching is still a niche market and a small market. It
hasn't been commoditised. Having less people focusing on products
is good for the end-user because it hopefully will make everybody
try harder," he said.
Brad O'Neill, senior analyst at the Taneja Group, said that the
"linchpin" for integration between the two product lines is some
software Brocade has been using in the field for nine months called
"McData interop," which enables Brocade and McData fabrics to work
together. "This provides interoperability for McData users going
forward," he said and helps overcome a major barrier in many
customers' minds. In 18 months' time, O'Neill estimates nothing
will have the McData badge on it. "They'll keep some key
intellectual property and funnel it into Brocade's products."
John Webster, founder and analyst with the Data Mobility Group,
expects Brocade to keep all the CNT channel extension products and
"anything to do with the mainframe business," which Brocade has not
been historically strong in. He said it will be interesting to see
which way it will go on the
WAFS product as Brocade has a partnership
with Tacit Software (now owned by Packeteer) while McData has an
OEM deal with Riverbed Technology. "It's going to take some time
to reconcile all the overlap."
As for the director-class switches, Webster said, "there will be
decisions to make -- in particular [McData's] i10,000. I would have
a real question as to that product's future."
In the short term, Webster said, "if Brocade plays this
intelligently, they won't be discontinuing any products -- they'll
preserve both going forward, preserving the status quo while
focusing on interoperability issues and pleasing their customers on
both sides."