Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Brocade Communications Systems is deepening its ties with a powerful ally, IBM, forging a new distribution deal for internet routers and switches at a time when bigger rival Cisco Systems is straining some of its old relationships.
Brocade and IBM are set to announce that IBM will help sell more Brocade products by re-branding them with IBM's own logo and pushing them out through IBM's sales force - a common arrangement among technology companies that gives the smaller one (Brocade) access to better distribution and the bigger one (IBM) access to products it didn't pay to manufacture.
IBM has resold Brocade products - specifically, switches that connect servers and data storage machines - in this way for over a decade.
The announcement is an expansion of that partnership, in which IBM will resell the internet routers and switches that Brocade picked up as part of its $3 billion acquisition last year of Foundry Networks, a small Cisco rival.
In that sense, the announcement is incremental for IBM, which as a one-stop technology shop has to play both sides of the fence when it comes to reselling competitors' products, but is major for Brocade, which is looking to step up its attacks on Cisco, the market leader, and benefits from IBM's reputation.
"That (IBM) brand obviously carries tremendous value," Dave Stevens, Brocade's chief technology officer, said in an interview.
IBM said in a statement that the expansion of the agreement with San Jose, California-based Brocade is about giving customers more choices. Armonk, New York-based IBM said it continues to work with Cisco and that the two companies have a strong relationship.
But after growing into one of Silicon Valley's most prominent companies by selling behind-the-scenes computing products, Cisco is now expanding aggressively, saying in recent weeks that it will start selling servers.
That has opened a new rivalry with longtime partners like Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM and shows how the landscape for back-end technologies is changing fast as companies hunt for growth in their allies' backyards.
Other examples are Oracle's proposed $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems (a shot at both HP and IBM) and HP's $13.9 billion takeover of Electronic Data Systems (a bid to better challenge IBM in services). HP is also getting more aggressive about pushing its own networking products that compete with Cisco.
IBM stopped making its own routers and switches in 1999 when the company sold that intellectual property to Cisco.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments