 Okay, welcome back to the Special Edition Cube broadcast. This is September 12th, 2012. This is SiliconANGLE.tv. We're live here in Silicon Valley, California for a special broadcast here at the Brocade Technology Analyst Day for SiliconANGLE.com and wikibond.org. I'm John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE.com. I'm here with wikibond.org's senior analyst, Stu Miniman, and what a great day, Stu, on September 12th. A lot of stuff happening on the web today. Obviously, the iPhone 5 dominates the news 100% across the board. There's some other flare-ups here. You see all the PR firms putting out all their negative news today. We saw Charlie Schiever step down from Quora. Big news there. Facebook guy just, I think, was summarily dismissed by the VCs while they slipped that news in on today if the iPhone is critical. But a lot going on in tech, Stu. So, quick rundown. iPhone 5 dominates the news. SiliconANGLE just wrapped up a two-day broadcast on SiliconANGLE TV channel two. We are our second channel. We're now expanding. So, Jeff Kelly with wikibond and Jeff Frick of SiliconANGLE, we're in Las Vegas, Nevada to for the Splunk Conference. And we have that all on youtube.com slash SiliconANGLE. So, go check out all the video footage. Got seven hours of materials, Stu, on that event there. And today's coverage, we've had at Brocade. I'll see huge news in the networking world. We heard from a variety of people today. Our most recent guest, someone in the trench is hosting huge clouds saying the shackles are coming off with networking. Finally, that's really the main story in the market today. And I want to get your take on that in a minute. And then obviously software to find everything, software to find infrastructure is the big rage. So, big news, the iPhone 5 and the big story there is bigger screen, LTE networking, a lot of great stuff. Certainly an upgrade. And for all the pundits out there that are saying it's a total yawn, they really don't know what they're talking about. This is an across the board upgrade for the iPhone 5. Definitely worth purchasing. And I think that's big news. So obviously, great stuff there. Stu, I want to get your opinion on Brocade. Brocade Technology Day, what do you think? So, John, it's interesting. It's a different Brocade than I grew up with. So, when you look at this market, as we talked with Mike Clayko, some of his executive team, Brocade is known as a storage company. And four years ago, they made the Foundry acquisition. They caught a lot of flak for it. So, people said, was it the right acquisition? They've got a highly profitable market that they dominate and the Ethernet market is much more competitive. Cisco dominated it for the last 15 years and there's some other big players in there. Then there were the acquisitions of big guys like HP buying three com, IBM buying BNT, Dell buying force 10. And is there a place in the market for Brocade? What do we learn today? Brocade has good technology and they're finding their place in the market. So, we talk- A competitive market. Competitive market, very competitive market. And as we said, we didn't talk about storage and fiber channel. It was Ethernet. Ethernet fabric is one that Brocade literally with the marketing. And yes, there's competition out there from the likes of Cisco and Juniper. But we talked to some of those early adopter, innovative customers, the service providers. Internet too, really helping drive the tip of the spear in next generation development of the internet. I mean, some really cool technology usage and they're finding Brocade's got great technology, distributed systems, software base, but with the hardware underneath it that just works, it's reliable. All the things that Brocade was known and trusted for on the storage side are getting translated into specific segments of the market where Brocade can get a foothold in that highly competitive market. You know, Stu, we had some great guests here at Brocade, a big day, innovation day, you know, this is all going on during the iPhone 5. Actually, I felt really good to be here today because the iPhone 5 is so overstimulating and so much noise out there. I mean, I just can't believe the garbage that's being pumped in by all those bloggers. You know, it's a very simple story, but it's, you know, it's certainly very relevant. But Brocade, I thought was a great day. We had Mike Clayko on today, CEO, who I thought was awesome. And, you know, I know he's stepping down as CEO and the specifics behind that aren't yet disclosed in terms of that's happening. New CEOs, not yet, they've been identified, so he's still going to be around. He's made some really good investments, so I think if you look back at his record and as CEO of Brocade, you know, they talk about the investments they've made, Stu, they made essentially a pivot, a term that's used not only to turn around, but a shift in a right way, and they made some investments and they were all good calls. And like we heard, it's a dog eat dog world. It's a very competitive space. They made the good call on the standards and certainly with software virtualization and network virtualization, good call there. So I'm very, very impressed with that. And just an overall great guy, CEO, caliber, tech athlete, but a great guy who knows his tech stuff. We also had Jason Nolette on VP's awesome. Call him the senator here at Brocade. Well-dressed, articulate, knows the space cold. The data center is very competent area for him. These guys are kicking it there. And then finally we had the CTO on, who again, very, very solid management team. What's your assessment of the executives today? Yeah, so John, you know, they've got smart people, you know, but Brocade has good talent. A lot of them they brought in through the acquisitions. So I mean, I work with Brocade. They've got, you know, they'll, you know, Nishon and CNT and in range, you know, WAN solutions, you know, the data center, they, you know, really just have, you know, a solid bench of networking talent. You know, there's been some ebb and flow over the couple of years, but you know, they've got a solid management team. They understand the market, they understand the trends. As we said, you know, software to find networking, open flow, open stack, all the hot topics. You know, they've got a position here and, you know, can argue that they've got a leadership position, or at least you can kind of try to drive innovation in those spaces. So Brocade's not sitting back and waiting for the market. As you stated before, you know, Brocade is really trying to get to where they think the puck will be. And that's what they've got to do. They are where the puck is going. So they're in a good spot. We talked about that today, but I really want to get your, kind of the futuristic perspective, because you are an analyst. You know the space goal. You know the fiber channel. You know what's going on in networking. You know the converges. You know the software-led infrastructure space that we're, that you're going to be putting out some new research on. But I want to ask you one specific question to Brocade and summary. What do you think they need to do right now? Obviously they've made some good calls. They're in a good strategic position. We heard that today. Stu, what do you think they need, what do they need to do to be successful at this point forward? Yeah, it's a great question, John. So, you know, Brocade, one of the challenges, you know, I think the service providers, they think can help them go to market. Because as we said, they have some partnerships, but traditionally it was an OEM go to market. So, you know, HP and EMC, a lot of times made up 50% of the revenue that they were doing in fiber channel. And that's all well and good, but they don't have necessarily the same partnerships on the ethernet side. So if they're going to fight against the likes of, you know, Cisco and their giant channel against, you know, Juniper, Arista and the HPs and Dell's of the world, you know, where are the technology partners? How are they baking themselves into solutions? And, you know, they're doing it leading with technology. And the marketing is interesting. So, Brocade CMO actually wasn't at this event. He's had a whole, you know, initiative around the data center is here. And to be honest, I'm not sure that it's resonating yet. So, you know, technology's solid. You know, how do they position themselves to be more strategic to, you know, the CIOs and the C-suite in the environment? And that's the biggest gap I see from Brocade. I think Wall Street really did not recognize them with a lot of stock bump today. They had heavy trading, but really just it was five cents up on the news today, but on heavy volume. So to me, heavy volume means there's going to be an inflection point in the stock. That's just my kind of technical analysis of the charts as I looked at them quickly today. And so I'm expecting either an up or down movement on the stock based on the heavy trading. Personally, I think Wall Street has no clue of what's going on in this area. I think this is going to be one of those things where a bunch of people are going to get it right and someone's going to get it wrong. It's pretty much a coin flip. You know, Facebook is the same thing with Facebook and it's an emerging area, not a lot of data out there. So John, you know, interesting point. You know, there are a bunch of the financial analysts here and I talked to a couple of them. And one of the things, there was good announcements today. To be honest, there were no surprises. Everything that they announced today were ones that they had been talking about for the last two years. So they're meeting what they said, they're delivering on, and some of the financial guys said, actually they're six months late on when they said they were going to do it and when it comes to upgrade cycles and deliveries of product, that's what the Wall Street guys are looking at. Here's my problem with Wall Street. Okay, this is to everyone on Wall Street right now. This is my problem with you. You don't know what you're talking about. You will penalize Brocade for being late on something you know nothing about. So they missed their milestone, but they're well ahead of the market there in a good spot. So my big problem with Wall Street is that they make all these decisions on quote track record and they try to police these companies that are developing emerging technologies. In a mature market, okay, I get that. Growth on their fiber channels up. So okay, they're good there, but Wall Street always gets it wrong in emerging markets. And the best analysts on Wall Street, the ones that really know their stuff, the ones that do get it, make the right calls based upon where the trend date is going. So that's my only complaint on Wall Street. And I think, you know- And John, on the technology, absolutely agree with you. But remember, we're talking about the Ethernet market here. Ethernet is a relatively stable market. SDN is not taking over the market anytime soon. If we're talking about Ethernet ports, you're over a year, you know, Brocade's flat. So, you know, they're using their technology to help gain businesses and gain relationships. So, you know, Ethernet is Ethernet. I'm from the East Coast. You live in the East Coast. You're just trying to align with Wall Street. Oh, my point exactly. Great news today. So if in case you missed it, Brocade announced the fabric and then, you know, there's some other smaller news like the iPhone 5 out there. So the top story today is Brocade's software fabric on SiliconANGLE. I know by the way, Stu, did you hear? Apple announced the iPhone 5. And iPhone. Yeah, so new iPhone is out there. How many are you ordering? I'm definitely going to upgrade. No problem with that. Great story today here at Brocade. Great story with Apple, I think, but Apple's showing us the new future. We're excited. Also excited to say we had a very successful cube of seven hours of coverage in Las Vegas with Splunk. Splunk is now public and got all that captured and documented. This is a great day. Stu, thank you very much. Thanks to Mark Hopkins and Mike Jones out there on the board and all the guests back at, all of the folks back at SiliconANGLE.com and Wikibon for getting the blog posts up and getting the videos up on YouTube. If you want to see the videos from today and from Splunk Conference, go to YouTube.com slash SiliconANGLE. All the videos are up there, so. Yes, John, we, you know, just want to say once again, you know, thanks to our hosts here at Brocade, you know, appreciate all the support from the comms team for bringing us in here, showing innovation to bring the cube and to really bring the real story of their customers to the community. And, you know, we've got a lot of shows coming up here through the rest of the fall. Oracle Open World's right around the corner. Lots of big data with Hadoop Stratoconference, IBM IOD, and, you know, lots of places where the cube's going to help bring, you know, information about all the new innovation and trends. Stu, couldn't you say that better myself? The cube is expanding. Look for more cubes out there from SiliconANGLE.tv. Also, stay tuned because you're going to start to see SiliconANGLE.tv 24-7. We're getting that going, getting the bumps out of the system. But as of now, we're going to be continuing to go out to the events. This is SiliconANGLE.tv's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract a signal from the noise. This is John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll see you in the next cube. Take care.