Brocade's Acquisition of McData: Where's the Value?

Brocade's proposed $713 million acquisition of McData may have won unanimous approval by both companies' boards, but the IT and financial communities aren't celebrating.

It's hard to see how the acquisition will add any value to either Fibre Channel product line, as the companies products overlap substantially. One wonders why Brocade didn't look to diversify, as it did when it bought NuView's file-based virtualization/management software portfolio. That purchase gave Brocade a degree of flexibility beyond its one-dimensional SAN focus.

One of the company's key goals is to improve interoperability; let's hope it's thinking beyond Brocade and McData. --Steven Hill, [email protected]