Network equipment vendor Brocade reported a slight year-over-year drop in revenue for the second quarter of fiscal 2010, ended on May 1. Product segments that showed highest growth rates were Ethernet and Storage Area Network solutions.

 

 

 

Total revenue Brocade reported for the quarter was $501m, a one percent drop year-over-year. The company's net income was $22.4m, a substantial improvement from a net loss it reported during the same quarter one year ago, but a 100-plus-percent drop from the $51.1m the company had reported for the preceding quarter.

Brocade CEO Michael Klayko said in a statement the company's Ethernet business had recovered during the quarter, growing 160 percent sequentially. He attributed much of the boost to sales into the federal-government sector. Ethernet products generated 26 percent of the quarter's entire revenue, with 28 percent of that consisting of sales to the feds. For comparison, Ethernet revenue from federal business in the first quarter was 13 percent of the total.

Catalyst in growth of the Ethernet market is 10Gb Ethernet, according to Brocade. The company sites Dell'Oro Group in predicticting the number of shipped 10GbE switch ports will go from more than 4 million this year to about 30 million in 2014.

Another product area that made notable impact on the company's revenue was its portfolio of storage networking solutions. One of the factors driving this growth was growth in the Fibre Channel market.

"Our Storage Area Networking business experienced robust demand among end-users, with better-than-normal seasonal results, in what is typically a weak SAN quarter," Klayko said. "Customers continue to invest in this tried-and-true technology to keep pace with ever-accelerating storage requirements and to better support emerging IT trends such as virtualization and migration toward cloud-enabled service models."

Two of Brocade's OEM partners are transitioning from being the company's primary way to access the SAN market to becoming complete networking solutions providers by reselling server connectivity and Ethernet products. The latest OEM to start reselling Brocade Ethernet solutions was EMC, with whom the company expanded its relationship earlier this month.

Another OEM on its way to becoming complete, end-to-end networking provider is Dell. The two companies are developing joint data center solutions that will address computing, storage and networking in the data center.

Dell also reported its financial results on Thursday. The company finished first quarter of fiscal 2011, ended April 30, with total revenue of $14.9bn, a 21 percent increase year-over-year. Dell's net income was $441m, a more-than-50-percent jump from the same three-month period one year prior.

The company's fastest-growing business segments were in the enterprise IT space. Servers showed a 39 percent increase in revenue. Enterprise storage product EqualLogic has shows quick growth as well, growing more than 75 percent in the second quarter. Revenue from the company's enterprise services grew more than 50 percent.

The three enterprise-IT segments combined showed 38 percent growth during the quarter, contributing $4.2bn to the company's total revenue. Dell attributed this growth to growing enterprise investment in technologies that increase efficiency, driven by virtualization, cloud computing and increased storage requirements.