Brocade Appoints Avnet Technology Solutions to Expand Distribution Network in South East Asia

The Partnership Aims to Deepen Brocade’s Market Penetration across the Government, Telecommunications, Financial Services, manufacturing and Enterprise Sectors

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia —Feb. 28, 2014: – Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) today announced the appointment of Avnet Technology Solutions, the global IT solutions distributor and an operating group of Avnet, Inc. (NYSE: AVT), as a Brocade IP and SAN Distributor for South East Asia (SEA), spanning Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam. A member of the Brocade Alliance Partner Network (APN) program, Avnet now has an extended distributorship agreement with Brocade from the Americas, Europe and Australia to South East Asia.

According to research and consulting firm BroadGroup, SEA markets will see sustained investment in data centers with a predicted 40 percent capacity increase by 2015. The continued growth is driven by many factors, ranging from the growth in mobile data to the emergence of the cloud and the market entry of many large-scale data center solution vendors. Additionally, Forrester Research forecasts that the Asia-Pacific cloud computing market will grow from US$6.9 billion in 2013 to US$31.9 billion in 2020, with the SEA region growing at a 24.7 percent compounded annual growth rate.

Bennett Wong, vice president and general manager for Avnet Technology Solutions, ASEAN, commented, “We look forward to our expanded relationship with Brocade, which spans the U.S., Europe, Australia and now South East Asia. Brocade represents an ongoing OEM business partnership. Together, we provide integration services, as well as other channel enablement and sales support. This agreement strengthens the business we already do with Brocade within our OEM community. It also creates opportunities for our channel partners to benefit from offering Brocade solutions that address market demand in mobility, Big Data and cloud computing.”

Under the agreement, Avnet will distribute Brocade® IP, SAN and software networking products to its network of channel partners and resellers across the region, including Ethernet fabric solutions for data center networking and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) solutions for Software-Defined Networking (SDN). Avnet will work closely with Brocade to develop its solution support expertise and accelerate Brocade go-to-market initiatives through training, certification, partner enablement and targeted sales and marketing programs. Both companies are also developing demo capabilities to bolster proof-of-concept activities.

“CIOs today are pushing cloud computing projects while keeping a close watch on new technologies such as Big Data analytics and SDN,” said Lily Foo, Brocade Head for South East Asia. “The market is burgeoning with opportunities for Brocade to deliver business-critical data center solutions to meet the evolving needs of our customers, especially through our Ethernet fabric and software networking solutions. Avnet’s appointment is a strategic move toward deepening our footprint in SEA, and across targeted industry verticals including government, telecommunications, financial services, manufacturing and commercial markets.”