Brocade loses out to Cisco’s SAN switch onslaught – News Review – Brief Article
Brocade has seen its market lead in storage area networking switches eroded dramatically over the past six months, following the entry of Cisco into this emerging market.
According to figures from Infonetics, Brocade’s share of the market for 2Gbps switches (99% of the whole), has fallen in port shipments terms from 59% in the second half of last year to 49% in the first six months of 2003. In revenue terms the drop is even more dramatic, with Brocade down from 60% to 40% in the same period.
This is in a market that has hardly increased its revenues in the 12 months studied–sales rose by just 1% to $522m from the second half of 2002 to midyear 2003, although unit shipments leapt by 35%. This shows that Brocade is growing its unit shipments, but is losing revenues to competitors in a market where prices are dropping overall.
We can assume that the main predators are McData and Cisco, although the giant is still categorized by Infonetics with ‘other vendors’ and so its own market share is not broken out. But analyst and director Nell Osipuk pointed to some “aggressive downpricing” since Cisco came into the sector earlier this year and said Cisco would merit a separate category in the next edition of the report in six months’ time.
The second ranked SAN switch supplier, McData, has suffered less from Cisco’s entry, with an increase in revenue share from 26% to 33% and a slight increase in unit market share to 25%. Other suppliers surveyed in the’others’ group are QLogic and Vixel, which are mainly focused on embedded switches, and CNT/Inrange.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Rethink Research Associates
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
