Investopedia: Brocade Moves Two Steps Forward, One And A Half Back

Brocade (Nasdaq:BRCD) is not a turnaround situation from a financial standpoint, but the stock has not managed to break out above $10 (and hold it) in almost a decade. Investors once loved the stock, but worries about the company's ability to match yesterday's growth in storage networking and find an interesting path in Ethernet has capped their enthusiasm of late. Now, with fiscal second quarter earnings in hand, the picture is still murky as the company cannot seem to make progress in both businesses at the same time. 


Some Good, Some Not So Good in Fiscal Q2
Brocade made some progress in the second quarter, but not as much as investors might have hoped. Revenue rose 10% overall from last year, but was up less than 1% on a sequential basis. Growth was led by the SAN business, which grew 17% from last year, but contracted a bit on a sequential basis. Ethernet was up a bit sequentially, but basically flat on an annual basis.

While the SAN business was helped by good performance in backbones, switches and adapters, the Ethernet business was smacked by a big year-on-year decline in revenue from federal customers, as several deals got pushed out. That federal detail is curious, as the state of the public sector market really seems to be a company-by-company phenomenon; Cisco (Nasdaq:CSCO) is not doing well here either, but Aruba Networks (Nasdaq:ARUN) (not a competitor to Brocade) and Juniper (Nasdaq:JNPR) don't seem to be having the same sort of problems.



To read the full piece, follow the link:
http://stocks.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/2011/Brocade-Moves-Two-Steps-Forward-One-And-A-Half-Back-BRCD-CSCO-QLGC-JNPR-EMC0525.aspx