Brocade Takes on the Government

Brocade moved to bolster its services business today with the acquisition of Herndon, Virginia-based Strategic Business Systems (SBS).

Rob Buergisser, Brocade’s director of services, support and solutions, said SBS’ government consulting business was a key reason for the deal. About 60 percent of the company’s consultants hold a federal security clearance.

The deal also gives Brocade a foothold in the server virtualization services market — 20 percent of SBS’ business is in server virtualization and other new areas for Brocade.

“It’s a really good match of services,” said Buergisser.

Brocade acquired much of its services business when it picked up storage switch rival McData. Services now account for about 15 percent of the company’s revenues.

Buergisser said SBS will also add to Brocade’s data center fabric, data protection and security, disaster recovery and data migration services business. The company’s networking focus gives it an advantage in multi-vendor environments over systems vendors, he said.

Eight-year-old SBS offers data center-focused professional services to enterprise and government customers. Partners include Dell, EMC, HDS, VMware, HP and Symantec. Clients have included AT&T, AOL, Citigroup, the U.S. State Department and Department of Veterans Affairs, and the U.S. Army and Navy.

The acquisition is expected to close by the end of April, after which SBS will become a wholly owned subsidiary within the Brocade Services, Support and Solutions Division under Brocade Vice President and General Manager Hugues Meyrath.

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