Brocade announced a number of investments, including a $100 million evaluation program, to enable eligible customers in the Asia Pacific region to deploy Ethernet fabrics as the foundation for virtualized data centers.
"Brocade intends to compete aggressively for the virtualization and cloud computing business in Asia Pacific because this region is so important to our company's long-term growth strategy," says Mike Klayko, CEO of Brocade. "We believe we have a highly differentiated offering in the Ethernet fabric space that is based on a 15-year heritage of technical innovation and experience in building the world's most mission-critical data center networks."
Investment components include the following:
-- Eligible Brocade customers in Asia Pacific would have access to a $100 million product-evaluation program that enables them to test Ethernet fabric and other cloud-infrastructure products and support from Brocade at no cost with the option to purchase from a preferred Brocade partner;
-- A series of executive-level roundtable meetings called "The Executive Cloud Study Program" aimed at regional IT executives and CIOs to be hosted at the Brocade campus in Silicon Valley. These executive forums will feature distinguished speakers and panelists from the leading Silicon Valley companies who are focused on the cloud and virtualization markets and is being planned to take place in June, September and December;
-- A technology workshop series called "How to Reach the Cloud with Brocade Ethernet Fabrics" designed to provide network architects and administrators with technical information on how to build virtualized data centers through reliable and scalable cloud-optimized networks. Brocade plans to host these half-day workshops at no cost to selected attendees in multiple countries and cities with the series planned to kick-off in May.
-- Brocade has nearly doubled the number of employees throughout Asia Pacific in the past 10 months.
"Growing a business requires continued investment especially in a region as competitive as Asia Pacific," says Deb Dutta, vice president and general manager of Asia Pacific for Brocade. "These investments demonstrate how strategic we view the opportunities in this region and reflect our confidence in our ability to grow our business in core and emerging markets here."
IT trends driving transformation in this region make it well suited to adopting this technology to migrate to private, public, and hybrid cloud computing architectures, according to a company spokesperson. The Asia Pacific region presents a vibrant market opportunity for virtualization and cloud-computing related technology investments as, according to industry research, expenditures for these technologies are expected to grow from $2.5 billion this year to more than $6.7 billion (USD) by 2016.
Brocade's Ethernet fabric system is powered by Brocade VCS technology and available through the Brocade VDX 6720 Data Center Switch.
