back to article '800lb Fibre Channel gorilla' Brocade axes 300 staffers worldwide

SAN fabric leader and Ethernet networking wannabee Brocade is going to fire 300 people to cut costs as it realigns its resources towards data centres and software-defined networking. The pink slip news was slipped out in an SEC 8-K filing (PDF) on 10 September. This should take its headcount from 4,180, to 3,880. Stifel …

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  1. MacGyver

    Greed

    They are making money hand over fist, so..... lets make some more at the cost of 300 people's livelihood.

    I hope their investors get the stock price they are hoping for just in time for X-mas. We already know what some of their employees are getting. pink slips.

  2. SirWired 1

    I think Brocade is one of those companies that should have realized they had a legacy business not going anywhere and decided to simply cheaply milk that cow (and pay dividends) as long as they could and then quietly dissolve. There's nothing wrong with that, but instead they've chosen to piss away their money with ill-advised acquisitions and product lines. (Hint: Just because you have some money and/or open credit, doesn't mean you have to spend it.)

    They were/are unacquirable since teaming up with any one of their major OEMs would simply cause the other OEMs to flee, greatly devaluing the business. And I'm not sure what they hoped to accomplish by buying a tiny 2nd-tier player like Foundry, at least not without a coherent plan to merge the product lines together. Years after the acquisition we are only now seeing Foundry gear with FCoE bits in it, and Brocade's "native" FCoE stuff is awkward, at best; the Nexus stuff is about 100x more seamless. Getting into the HBA business was a fool's errand; I don't know why Brocade thought they could gain any marketshare whatsoever without any compelling advantage vs. the two players who've had over a decade to work all the kinks out. (Brocade had some interesting performance-oriented features in their HBAs useful only to a market so niche they'd never pay back their development costs.)

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