History 2005: Brocade Invests in Tacit

Rhapsody Networks is the only known acquisition to date of Brocade Communication Systems, at a cost of $175 million back in 2002.

But it has recently made up for lost time, with 2 announced transactions in an interval of 2 days: 1) an investment of “up to $7.5 million” in Tacit Networks and 2) the purchase of Therion Software for $9.3 million in cash.

Brocade will get a minority ownership into Tacit which delivers WAFS (Wide Area File Systems) on Windows server 2003 platform. WAN and WAFS acceleration products are highly in-demand at the moment, within the storage industry, for transferring data across a great distance.

This is the first we’ve heard of the mysterious Therion, currently in stealth mode, although Brocade indicates that it has been working with the company for over a year “on technologies that will leverage SAN infrastructure to address challenges in the enterprise data center,” which doesn’t tell us much.

CEO Frank Artale, however, who will join Brocade, is not unknown. He spent 9 years at Microsoft, from 1991 to 2000, where he accumulated thousands of stock options. Subsequently, he was VP of the Windows business unit at Veritas, then founder, president and CEO of Consera Software, sold to HP in 2004, before he set up Therion, based in Redmond, WA. In September 2004, he was also named chairman of network device automation company Rendition Networks, still in Redmond, WA, which was sold 3 months later for $33 million to Opsware, involved in server and network automation.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 209 on June 2005 from the former paper version of Computer Data  Storage Newsletter.