Brocade announced Fujitsu Consulting India as a customer today, saying the organization has deployed Brocade’s switches and software-defined networking (SDN) infrastructure at a 2,000-seat global delivery center (GDC) in Pune and Bangalore in India.
Specifically, Fujitsu Consulting is using Brocade’s ICX 7250 Stackable Switches, which provide support to IP phones, WiFi access points, and other devices, as well as its ICX 7750 switches for the campus-network core. The combination will allow Fujitsu to accommodate an additional 1,000 seats in its GDC this coming year. Fujitsu will also be deploying other Brocade switches to help virtualize data center operations.
All of Brocade’s switches at the Fujitsu GDC support the OpenFlow protocol, enabling IT professionals to reconfigure physical and virtual networks as needed.
The timing of the announcement is nice for Brocade’s IP networking business, which is up for sale.
Brocade is being acquired by Broadcom for $5.9 billion, as announced last week, and Broadcom plans to divest Brocade’s IP networking business as soon as possible. That’s led to questions about who would buy the division, which was built up through the acquisitions of Foundry Networks, Vyatta, and Ruckus Wireless, which Brocade acquired for $1.2 billion this summer.
Foundry, in particular, is a direct competitor of Cisco and Juniper, which are among the vendors using Broadcom’s switching chips. So there is no surprise the chip maker was in a rush to hand off that part of the business.
