DataCenter

Brocade to acquire Foundry

Brocade Communications, a data center fibrechannel switch player, is acquiring Foundry, the Ethernet switch company. The deal is likely to meet little resistance from any regulatory or shareholder perspective and so can be considered done.

We believe this move is a step toward recognizing a major truth of enterprise networking, which is that in market cycles driven by IT factors, as this one is, data center switching is the most likely to lead the networking portion of the purchase cycle. In addition, data center products can pull through products elsewhere (which this deal is clearly banking on), while the opposite is not true.

Given the increased influence of IT in overall technology procurement (and the collateral decline of the influence of networking), we believe this to be a very smart move indeed. This acquisition may lead to some additional consolidation in the LAN switching and data center area as other players make counter-moves.

IBM earnings point to SOA success

IBM reported exceptionally strong numbers, and so one of our critical data points for the future of tech has been obtained, and in a positive direction. IBM revenue growth accelerated to 13%, EPS grew by 28%, but the US sector was last among the major markets with only an 8% growth rate.

EMEA led with 20% and Asia showed 16% growth. The growth was in software and services (about 17% in each category); computer hardware grew at only 2% overall but systems grew at 10%.  IBM’s branded middleware grew at 21%, and WebSphere by 9%.

We believe the IBM numbers, particularly its service numbers, show that projects on SOA-driven modernization and the mashup process are pulling through software purchasing, thus creating the normal behavior for the IT cycle we believe to be driving the market at the moment.

We note that IBM’s information management tools expanded by 30%, showing that changes in IT directions are also changing the information content of worker experiences. All of this points to a positive data point for recovery of enterprise networking in 2009 and the need to prepare for this immediately. We believe that the strategic management changes by Cisco and Juniper are designed in part to prepare for the coming year’s changes in opportunity.

HP nears EDS acquisition deal

HP is nearing an agreement to acquire EDS, which would make it the second-largest integrator in the world after IBM and a truly formidable challenger to IBM for perhaps the first time. The deal comes as the role of IT is shifting in the market in general, due to the emergence of the SOA-driven IT cycle, and also to a shifting relationship between IT and networking. While the deal highlights competition in the IT space, it also has implications for Cisco, whose software/service initiative is the company’s primary growth strategy. EDS has also had relationships with network vendors and a not-too-successful strategy to integrate networks and services it launched with Level 3.

ExperiaSphere adds cloud computing project

We have added a cloud computing project dimension to ExperiaSphere, a CIMI Corporation open source software activity in the service logic and service management logic area. The enhancement will permit ExperiaSphere to be used to link to cloud computing applications, to support the development of those applications, and to use cloud computing as a platform for service and service management logic. See our ExperiaSphere wiki for details.

IBM cloud computing focused on networking control?

Cloud computing may be heading for a major role in the marketing plans of major vendors like Sun, HP, IBM, and Microsoft. Since the Internet is really an information network, it is really as much or more about storage and software as about network routers and other bit-moving gear, and IBM’s recent announcement of cloud computing support shows that the big IT players want to formalize their participation in and control of the server side. We believe that cloud computing activity will also push out into enterprise computing, and that it is a major part of IBM’s strategy to wrestle control of networking away from Cisco and its competitors.