You can eliminate Oracle from the list of possible suitors for Brocade, which reportedly put itself on the block this week. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison emphatically quashed any notion that the software giant is interested in acquiring the data center SAN company, according to reports here and here.
That still leaves HP, IBM, Dell, EMC and Juniper among the possible candidates to acquire Brocade. And despite the enormous product overlap, one cannot discount Cisco from the running either.
That Brocade put itself up for sale — which the company did not confirm, despite a Wall Street Journal story citing unnamed sources — means some long awaited consolidation is coming for the data center IT industry. The list of acquirers include IBM, HP, Dell and Cisco, while the acquirees include Brocade, Juniper EMC, NetApp and others. Some are interchangeable between acquiree and acquirer, like Juniper and EMC.
There's even specualtion that a company like QLogic, which makes data center server and storage adapters, should take out an Ethernet switching company like Extreme Networks, which lost a considerable amount of value this week.
