LAS VEGAS – Numerous announcements in the “co-opetition” trend are debuting around the Brocade Conference 2002 this week.
Officials of Brocade Communications Systems Inc., the San Jose, Calif. storage switching vendor, announced several expansions to their user education and corporate partner programs. Also, storage maker LSI Logic Corp. announced its interoperability with Brocades newest switch, the high-end SilkWorm 12000, and Hewlett-Packard Co. will make the same announcement later this week, Brocade Chairman and CEO Greg Reyes said in a keynote address today. Moreover, “All of our partners” will be interoperable by the end of this month, he said, referring to EMC Corp., the only significant storage company not yet certifying the 64- and 128-port 12000 systems.
Among the additions to the user education programs is a new Internet-accessible laboratory, also in San Jose, which will give users much of the same training as in-person experiences yield, but without the travel costs, said Jay Kidd, vice president of marketing. Similarly, Brocade has signed 19 new corporate training partners, who are devoting new tracks for storage-area network (SAN) studies, he said. Those include Cary, N.C.-based Global Knowledge Network Inc., which will have a SAN building class, Kidd said.
On the partnership front, Brocade today announced expanded interoperability with storage management software from Islandia, N.Y.s Computer Associates International Inc., and tomorrow, HP, of Palo Alto, Calif., will announce support for Brocades products at HP customers, regardless of who made the original user sale, Kidd said.