And while the company has repeated its claim that Cisco is no longer gaining ground in the SAN market, it says it will no longer supply any information to analyst or researchers attempting to estimate market shares.

Those were some of the messages delivered at an investors’ conference held by the company in Boston, Massachusetts, where the company also said that it will ship some form of network-based services platform next year.

The company did not say specifically that it expects to beat Cisco to market with the first products supporting the next 8Gbit per second version of Fibre Channel, but it implied that strongly when it said at different times that 8GFC would help maintain its market share, and grow its share.

Two years ago Brocade gained a lot of market share by being well ahead its rivals in the move from 2GFC to 4GFC, and it obviously hopes to pull off the same trick again.

We chose to drive hard from 2GFC to 4GFC, said Brocade CFO Richard Deranleau. There’s a whole lot of fairly new 4GFC out there, and there’s no weak competitor in McData. That gives us a new opportunity, Deranleau said.

Brocade marketing vice president Tom Buicchi said that he realized that a decision to cease cooperating with researchers such as the Dell’Oro might suggest that Brocade knows that it will continue to lose share to Cisco.

But he insisted that the reason why Brocade is no longer going to provide shipment or revenue number to researchers is simply that they get it wrong.

But that did not stop Buiocchi from referring to market share numbers that he said proved that following the merger of Brocade and McData, Cisco’s market share has already stopped growing.

I looked at the market share for the six months before the merger, and the market share for six months after. It was 73% versus 73%, and of course I was really happy to see that, he said. Those were port shipment shares, as Buiocchi claimed that revenue shares were invalid because Cisco does not declare SAN revenue breakdowns.

Analysts at the conference were divided as to whether Brocade has managed to stop Cisco in its tracks, so quickly after the merger of Brocade and McData.

JMP Securities managing director backed Brocade. I don’t think Cisco can do any more damage, he said. Referring to Cisco’s opportunity to poach customers unsettled by the merger, he said: They fight on fear, uncertainty and doubt, but that’s over.

IDC analyst Rick Villars said that IDC as policy does not predict market shares. But he said that Brocade and Cisco’s OEM customers such as EMC, IBM and HP will want to keep both suppliers in the market, and will not want to see either gain too large a market share. He also pointed out that when the merger removed McData from the market, OEMs that wanted to continue to dual-source SAN gear brought Cisco in so inflating Cisco’s market share.

The only way you’ll see a radical change in market share is if there are any technology failures and people are paid a lot of money to make sure that that does not happen, Villars said.

Illuminata analyst John Webster said: It’s far too early to say whether Cisco has been stopped.

Brocade had already promised to ship 8GFC gear in the first half of its fiscal year beginning in February 2008, and said very little about the products that will bring in the 8GFC support.

They will ship under the marketing banner DCX, and will include an upgraded version of the existing Brocade 48000 director, as well as a new large, multi-protocol and multi-function flagship. This will be the converged platform, which will be able to work in networks built with either pre-merger McData or Brocade gear.

Brocade also said that next year it will be shipping a range of plug-in services such as data encryption and replication. Brocade did not say specifically where these will run on, but it looks likely that this will be that flagship director.

Our View

Cisco’s SAN market share has been rising steadily ever since it entered the sector in 2002, and Brocade’s merger with McData is not going to stop it continuing to creep up. But because the merger tranformed the relationship with the OEM suppliers that buy and then resell the huge bulk of SAN gear, it has guaranteed Brocade’s future as a Fibre Channel supplier – for as long as there is a Fibre Channel market to serve.