Accelerating Storage Networking demand aligns with our view of the strengthening of the entire IT market, corroborated by Forrester Research, which, in January, predicted that global IT spending will grow by an estimated to 8.1% in 2010, up from 4.9% previously. Looking at our Storage Networking mix, our strong performance is fueled by the continuing migration to 8 Gigabit Fibre Channel, reflected by the fact that our 8 Gig Fibre Channel revenues more than doubled on a sequential basis. Analysts agree that the transition to 8 Gig Fibre Channel is in full ramp. For example, the Dell’Oro Group estimates that 8 Gig Fibre Channel spending will increase sharply in 2010, reaching $2.0B, up from $1.2B in 2009. Additionally, TheInfoPro recently surveyed Storage Networking end-users at Fortune 1000 firms who ranked 8 Gig Fibre Channel as one of the highest priority budget items in 2010, with 46% of these respondents indicating plans to increase spending on 8 Gig Fibre Channel this year. The good news for Brocade is that customers view us as the vendor-of-choice in 8 Gig Fibre Channel. Fibre Channel momentum also continues among our partners with the recent and planned introductions of native 8 Gig Fibre Channel arrays from major OEMs including EMC, HDS and IBM. As strong as Storage Networking was in Q1, we believe that the second half outlook continues to improve based on indications from partners, feedback from our field sales force, and from analysts covering the space. Morgan Stanley recently reported that storage utilization is unsustainably high. Additionally, their January survey of CIOs indicated that over 60% expect to increase storage spending in the second half of 2010, in part driven by the resumption of delayed projects. This is a sharp increase from the October survey results. Similarly, The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) reported that enterprise customers expect to significantly increase spending on both storage and networking hardware in 2010 versus 2009. Specifically, ESG is predicting that customers will increase network hardware spend by 17% and storage hardware spend by 16%. Lastly, the Federal government is looking to achieve IT productivity comparable to levels found in the private sector, and has announced plans to consolidate a meaningful number of its more than 1000 data centers in the coming year. These spending trends bode well for Brocade and our partners. © 2010 Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. Page 8 of 40 |