For networking vendor Brocade, fiscal 2015 was somewhat of a mixed year for results. Brocade reported its fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2015 earnings on November 23.
For the quarter, revenue was reported at $589 million for a 4 percent year-over-year gain. Full fiscal 2015 revenue was reported at $2.3 billion for a 2 percent year-over-year gain. Net income for the fourth quarter came in at $84.4 million, while full year net income was $340.4 million.
“From a market perspective, fiscal year 2015 was a year of both challenges and opportunities for Brocade,” Lloyd Carney, CEO of Brocade, said during his company’s earnings call. “For the year, our SAN revenue declined 2 percent, largely due to the result of weaknesses in our Fibre Channel switches and embedded switches, while we saw solid growth in directors. At the same time, our IP Networking revenue grew 14 percent for the full year.”
Carney highlighted a number of reasons for renewed optimism in Brocade, including technology innovation. He noted that in fiscal 2015, Brocade was awarded 86 patents and released over two dozen hardware and software releases.
“In addition, we continue to expand our software-centric capabilities for new IP architectures through both technology innovation and strategic acquisitions,” Carney added.
For Brocade, the goal moving forward is to increase customers’ use of multiple Brocade technologies. Carney said that Brocade’s product portfolio drives efficiency to its customers’ environments, so the more product they deploy, the more efficient they become.
Carney blamed constrained budgets in 2015 for limiting some of Brocade’s growth.
“Without the constrained budgets, I think we have done much better,” Carney said. “I had a one-on-one conversation with major customers in Europe and in South America, who just quite frankly said, here is my budget, Lloyd, it was set a year ago.”
Carney is very optimistic about the potential growth that both the public and private cloud market represents to Brocade.
“We think this trend towards public private cloud is moving directly into our sweet spot,” Carney said.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Networking Planet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
