News

posted on 04 March 2008 09:57

Brocade, the SAN fabric switch and director, and file services vendor, is buying Strategic Business Systems (SBS), an IT professional services company.

SBS is a private company, founded in 2000, and head-quartered in Herdon, Virginia, USA. It provides data centre-focussed services and has partnerships with many large providers of IT services. SBS has skilled consultants who provide technical expertise across a wide range of professional services practices, including storage, servers, security, networking, and virtualisation services pertinent to  enterprise data centres.

Such experitise and contacts will be useful to Brocade in helping to advance sales of its DCX data centre backbone switch.

Michael Klayko, Brocade's CEO, commented thus: “The data centre is evolving at unprecedented rates and customers are asking us to provide more services that solve real-world business challenges. SBS’s team of skilled professionals and comprehensive portfolio of service methodologies will enable us to offer an expanded line of services that address the challenges of our customers’ rapidly evolving data centres.”

The SBS services will be integrated into the existing portfolio of Brocade professional services offerings, which include:

* Data Centre Fabric Infrastructure: Enables business agility and growth by providing a robust and flexible data management infrastructure
* Virtualization: Provides cost-effective, flexible, and efficient use of IT infrastructure across the data centre
* Data Protection/Security: Helps ensure that data is safe and highly available to meet both business and compliance objectives
* Data Migration: Supports reliable data movement to make sure data is available wherever and whenever it is needed

IDC's Doug Chandler said: “Brocade’s acquisition of SBS is consistent with its goal of building an end-to-end services portfolio.”

The acquisition of SBS is expected to close in the second quarter of Brocade’s Fiscal Year 2008. Following the close, SBS will be managed as a wholly owned subsidiary within the Brocade Services, Support, and Solutions Division under the leadership of Brocade Vice President and General Manager Hugues Meyrath.