Ruckus Acquisition Strengthens Brocades Strategic Presence

Brocade is a strong networking player which is deeply entrenched in the service provider space globally and India. The company has over the years grown organically as well as inorganically. Brocade’s recent acquisition of Ruckus Wireless has flexed company’s muscle. Voice&Data spoke to Andrew Coward, VP of Service Provider Strategy at Brocade who was recently in India. Coward divulged how the company plans to move ahead in multiple markets including India.

- Onkar Sharma

Voice&Data: How do you use acquisitions to strengthen your position?

Andrew Coward: We have increased our presence in the service space more specifically after Brocade acquired Foundry in 2008. The routing products are deployed in many large service providers and exchange products. Then the company acquired Vyatta in 2012 which gave us a new angle to compete and put us on a road toward software networking even before NFV came on the scene. The Vyatta products helped us to capitalize the business opportunities for virtual routing, virtual CPE, virtual firewall, and so on. Vyatta allowed us to start focusing on cloud service providers, and we began to build our larger service provider organization from there.

Most recently the company acquired Ruckus Wireless which has complemented Brocade’s enterprise networking portfolio. It has significantly strengthened Brocade’s strategic presence in the broader service provider space, with Ruckus’ market-leading Wi-Fi position.

As companies move to digitize their business, they need an underlying network architecture that supports business agility. This new IP architecture enables the network to become a platform for innovation and for developing, delivering, and securing new applications.

Voice&Data: How does Ruckus Wireless empower Brocade’s position? What does it mean to customers?