fibre channel

Emulex: We’re about more than Fibre Channel

We don’t know yet what Emulex’s board will do about the takeover offer from Broadcom, but Emulex management hardly seems resigned to becoming the Fibre Channel piece of a larger vendor’s convergence strategy.

Since Broadcom went public with its move on Emulex last week, Emulex executives have been positioning their company as one with enough Ethernet capability to successfully compete with Broadcom and others on that front.

The new spin started on the Emulex earnings call Monday night. “The cornerstone of our strategy is the converged data center, based on 10-gig Ethernet technology,” CEO Jim McCluney said. “Our converged data center network is one that unifies IP and storage networking over a single wire.”

McCluney said the strategy revolves around its OneConnect Universisal Converged Network Adpaters and OneCommand management platform. Both rely on 10-Gigabit Ethernet for iSCSI, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and enhanced Ethernet.

With ASICs it gained through a joint development partnership with startup ServerEngines, Emulex claims 16 10-Gigabit Etherenet-based cards, five 10-GigE NIC design wins, three 10-GigE iSCSI adapter wins, and four Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) design wins with OEM partners.

“While we’re not in a position to announce the details of these wins, we believe some of them have come at the expense of our leading competitors, including Broadcom,” McCluney said.

Financial analysts on the call got the point. “On numerous occasions during the earnings call, Emulex alluded to 10GbE, iSCSI, and FCoE-based, Tier 1 OEM design wins, suggesting the company may not require additional Ethernet-based expertise to compete well in the ongoing unified fabric adoption cycle,” analyst Amit Daryanani of RBC Capital Markets wrote in a note to clients.

So when I spoke to Emulex chief marketing officer Steve Daheb this week about the company’s strategy, it was no surprise he declared Emulex an Ethernet company.

“People are saying,’ You’re kidding me, you guys have done the Fibre Channel thing, now you tell me you’re winning 10-gig NIC deals, Ethernet-based deals?’” he said. “And we are.”

Daheb added that Emulex isn’t abandoning Fibre Channel. It will add encryption and security features to its HBAs, and will support the FC roadmap beyond 8-Gbps.

“We continue to invest in Fibre Channel,” Daheb said. “We have 8-gig HBAs today, and we’ll be a player in 16-gig Fibre Channel.”

But Emulex sees there is more to the world than FC. It could even conceivably follow its HBA rival QLogic into InfiniBand.

“It’s something we’re watching carefully,” Daheb said. “We see InfiniBand for inter-switch clustering catching on. But we’re betting on Ethernet here. With the low latency [of enhanced Ethernet], you get a lot of those same benefits as InfiniBand.”

Broadcom turns up the heat on Emulex

Storage insiders predicted the Oracle-Sun deal would kick off a series of acquisitions, and now today chipmaker Broadcom is making a move on HBA vendor Emulex. Broadcom’s unsolicited offer of approximately $9.25 a share or $764 million is about a 40% premium over Emulex’s closing price of $6.61 yesterday.

Broadcom has actually been after Emulex for a while. When Emulex adopted a poison pill in January to defend it from unwanted suitors, Broadcom was the unwanted suitor it had in mind. A letter that Broadcom Scott McGregor sent to Emulex’s chairman Paul Folino and its directors today revisited that acquisition attempt:

“We were disappointed when, in early January, you responded that the company was not for sale and abruptly cut off the possibility of further discussions. Even more troubling was the fact that merely one week after that communication, you took actions clearly designed to thwart the ability of your shareholders to receive a premium for their shares. … It is difficult for us to understand why Emulex’s Board of Directors has not been open to consideration of a combination of our respective companies. We would much prefer to have engaged in mutual and constructive discussions with you. However this opportunity is in our view so compelling we now feel we must share our proposal publicly with your shareholders.”

McGregor went on in the letter to lay out Broadcom’s vision for single-chip converged network devices delivering Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet. He also laid out a case why it would benefit Emulex to accept the offer:

“Customers will demand from their suppliers advanced chip technology and supply chain scale and reliability which is not an area of strength for Emulex. Broadcom brings tremendous value in advanced chip technology and supply chain scale and reliability to Emulex’s products—and customers.”

McGregor’s letter also stated that Broadcom is taking legal action to declare Emulex’s poison pill invalid.

Broadcom has tried to make inroads in storage before. It has sold chips for FC switches and a few years ago developed a converged network interface (C-NIC) that including a TCP/IP offload engine (TOE), iSCSI HBA and remote memory access (RDMA) technology onto one chip – a forerunner of the current FCoE CNAs without the Fibre Channel. However, Broadcom hasn’t been successful in storage and today’s earnings report – it lost $92 million last quarter — show it hasn’t been successful period lately.

The approach of FCoE could prompt more Ethernet companies to look for FC technology, the reverse of Brocade’s acquisition of Ethernet provider Foundry late last year.

“Broadcom doesn’t want to buy Emulex for its embedded switch business, it wants its Fibre Channel stack,” Wedbush Morgan research analyst Kaushik Roy says. “To compete, you’ll need a Fibre Channel stack. And if Juniper has half a brain they will buy QLogic, although Juniper’s never known for doing a lot of acquisitions.”

Roy says Emulex may use its poison pill to negotiate an even better deal, but he said the time could be right to sell. For years, Emulex and QLogic have had a duopoly for HBAs but there will be greater competition as FCoE takes hold.

“There are a lot of players getting into FCoE, Emulex’s revenues and margins will be under pressure,” Roy said.

In a note to clients today, Stifel Nicolaus Equity Research analyst Aaron Rakers indicated that Emulex has fallen behind QLogic in developing FCoE technology. “We believe [Emulex] would face some strategic and fundamental challenges going forward with regard to its positioning in blade servers, our belief that QLogic is better positioned in FCoE, and continued secular headwinds in its Embedded Storage Product (ESP) division,” Rakers wrote.