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KP Unnikrishnan, Director, Marketing, Brocade Asia Pacific, spoke to Sonal Desai on how the company is taking on established networking players and winning
What’s the scope of Brocade’s business in India? What are your plans?
Brocade has a significant presence here with over 2,000 customers using our products including both the SAN switches and the IP networking solutions acquired through Foundry. Nearly 60 percent of these customers use our SAN switching products as part of an OEM offering from HP, IBM, etc.
Till a couple of years back Brocade didn’t have a direct connect with customers because most of our products were sold through OEMs. But now, with an expanded networking portfolio through the numerous acquisitions we have made, Brocade is engaging directly with customers and channels although our OEM relationships continue to be strong.
Most customers were aware of our technology but had little interface with us. When we began reaching out to CIOs we realized that while they knew we were a leading company with unique SAN switching technology, they didn’t know we had expanded our networking portfolio with acquisitions in the recent past.
Over the last two years we have spent considerable dollars marketing our expanded portfolio, engaging directly with customers, and enabling partners. We believe we are now ready to leverage this investment into sales and market share.
With the acquisition of Foundry you have a strong IP portfolio. How are you leveraging this to compete with the more established networking players such as Cisco and Juniper?
We have the most comprehensive offerings for core networking and data center networking. With the acquisition of Foundry we have the IP portfolio, and our R&D teams have been working to converge the two technologies to offer fiber channel over Ethernet solutions.
Early this year we launched the VDX range of switches which offers a convergent solution. It consists of two offerings—the VDX 6730, which is a 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch that can bridge VCS Ethernet fabrics to fiber channel SAN fabrics; and the VDX 6710, a 1/10 GbE switch that can enable 1 GbE switches to connect to Ethernet fabric environments and data center LANs.
Another new product, Brocade Network Advisor, offers unified management of Brocade Ethernet fabrics with other LAN, SAN and application delivery infrastructure.
The response to VDX has been fantastic: we’ve signed up 50 customers in the last quarter since the launch of this platform.
We’re extremely bullish about the potential of the VDX range, and have been running some aggressive marketing strategies which include educating customers through physical workshops, Webinars and events about the benefits of our products in the data centers.
We have launched the Try Brocade program, setting up POCs. Once the POC is over, we approach customers with the proof points of the differences and benefits Brocade brings to their functionality.
We also have a strong partner-led strategy for VDX. We’ve built communication materials around VDX for the partners to let them run their own communication programs by using Brocade content with or without our logo; any partner can do his own Webinar on VDX.
In addition, if a partner wants to get trained, he can go to the Brocade video portal and get trained on how to use the VDX/VCS product and how to sell it; he can also learn about the advantages and the main points.
A large chunk of the $100 million investment we have earmarked for Asia is meant for promoting the VDX/VCS platform because we believe it’s the best unified fabric architecture available in the market—also, a few generations ahead of the competition. Our aim is to leverage this technology advantage to gain mind share and market share.
Brocade recently launched the subscription model for data center products. How does this work?
The subscription program, named Brocade Network Subscription, lets customers pay for their network infrastructure on a monthly basis. This ensures that customers don’t have to invest in networks with a 2-3 year horizon; instead, they can invest as their network capacity expands.
The subscription service is available for all Brocade IP/Ethernet products, including VDX data center switches. The service includes professional service support from Brocade Global Services.
Why should partners align with Brocade?
We currently have 60 partners in the country; most of them have come on board over the past year or so. We want to grow this number, but not to a large extent. We are looking for focused, niche partners.
We have a product portfolio that gives partners deals ranging from $25,000 to a million and more. We work with four sets of partners. The first is service providers who are providing IaaS. The second set consists of ISPs who provide connectivity solutions. Then we have enterprise partners who cater to medium-to-large organizations, and volume partners who sell our smaller boxes.
Isn’t it difficult to break the dominance of players like Cisco, Juniper and HP in the networking segment?
Last quarter we were recognized as the best alternative to these established networking players.
We shipped the first batch of Ethernet fabric-based products last November, and shipped the second batch this September. The competition is talking about Ethernet fabric only now.
Plus, because of our strong focus on the OEM business so far, interoperability is the biggest advantage we enjoy. Moving from HP to Cisco, or vice versa, would require customers to replace their existing infrastructure; in our case, due to our advantage (of interoperability) they don’t have to write off any investment.
Also, for Cisco partners, selling Brocade isn’t much of an investment. The time and resources required for upskilling their CCNA resources to Brocade certification is minimal—and this is also working to our advantage.
What is your focus for India in the next 12 months?
We will focus on the cloud opportunity, and will look to partner with key organizations in their cloud strategy. Also, being the first off the block to offer fully-ready IPv6-compatible products, we hope to enable enterprises looking to move to the IPv6 environment with ease.
To address the final mile we believe in empowering our partners to do well. We don’t want to end up with partners competing against each other—that way no one makes money. |