Vyatta, A Brocade Company

Today, Brocade announced plans to acquire Vyatta ... and we couldn't be more proud!

It's been a fascinating journey to get to this next level. They say you can always tell the pioneers by the number of arrows in their back, but for the record will clearly show these three forces that drove us:

1 million downloads. It all started with our pioneering belief that software networking could go viral. It did, and the Vyatta community grew in the way self-organizing communities do. Today, Vyatta has the largest software networking footprint on the planet.

Virtualization. This was the fuel that powered our strongest commercial adoption. It changes what network infrastructure needs to do and software is the clear answer to a rapidly-growing problem. Now Vyatta is in live-production data centers, as well as test and dev around the world.

SDN. A cool concept - software networking - got even cooler by becoming Software-Defined Networking. Central controllers and distributed forwarding planes, northbound APIs ... in all, a huge new wave of innovation crashes up on the shore.

All of this excitement has been in pursuit of the next frontier of IP networking. No longer is networking something that happens only outside the server; now it extends into the server itself, creating a new world of virtual topologies that complement the physical ones surrounding them. And the world is rapidly waking up to this exciting new frontier.

So why choose Brocade as the place for our next act? Because our products and strategies are incredibly synergistic. We have a shared vision for networking's role in the agile data center, common commitment to openness, they're healthy and they have a global reach that we can leverage.

As Brocade's Software Networking business unit, we get the best of both worlds: The solidity of a multi-billion-dollar network infrastructure player with the agility of an innovative software group.

More importantly, our customers and partners get an even more aggressive partner for their SDN strategies - one that truly understands both the technology and the business of IP networking, as well as one that isn't the least bit afraid of wielding an aggressive software strategy.

This is an exciting new phase and we will hit the ground running. We cherish our heritage and look forward to continuing to make our mark on the industry as Vyatta, a Brocade company.