Brocade Advances SDN Vision With Vyatta Acquisition

Brocade (BRCD) announced Monday that it will acquire privately held networking company Vyatta, in an all-cash transaction. Vyatta offers software-based network operating system that is highly relevant for multiple applications in network virtualization, software-defined networking (SDN) and private/public cloud computing platforms.

Founded in 2005, privately-held Vyatta received numerous rounds of venture funding, from ArrowPath Venture Partners, Velocity Interactive Group, Citrix Systems and others.  The  Vyatta Network OS was pioneered as the first platform-independent network operating system, which enables system architects to secure and connect virtual, cloud or physical infrastructures while delivering the same elasticity, mobility, auto-provisioning and utility licensing benefits of the applications they support.

"This acquisition complements our R&D investments in Ethernet fabrics and SDN, as well as our broad industry and solutions-level partnerships that enable Brocade to pursue new market opportunities in data center virtualization, public cloud, enterprise virtual private cloud, and managed services," said Mike Klayko, CEO of Brocade. "We are now bolstering these 'build and partner' efforts with this strategic acquisition with the goal of being the innovation and thought leader in the software networking category."

The acquisition enables Brocade to extend its open data center fabric and IP networking technologies directly into any number of server hypervisor environments and offer an end-to-end architecture built on a highly virtualized , dynamic infrastructure. Vyatta will be a part of the Routing, Application Delivery and Software Networking at Brocade.  The company stated that  it will continue to support to the open source community.

"There are many significant developments happening today that are redefining data center architectures and industry landscapes," said Ken Cheng, vice president of the Routing, Application Delivery and Software Networking Group at Brocade. "The Vyatta acquisition brings in considerably more software networking technology and expertise to Brocade. We believe software networking to be a critical component in the next phase of network virtualization as enterprises are becoming increasingly virtualized and actively moving workloads to the cloud."