Q&A: Mike Klayko, CEO at Brocade

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This week saw Brocade’s annual Tech Summit Day take place at its brand new headquarters in San Jose, California.

We got some time with the chief executive (CEO) of the company, Mike Klayko, to talk about the future of networking in the cloud and Brocade’s plans on our side of the Atlantic.

Can you tell us how the Brocade One strategy has gone down with customers over the past year?

It is resonating very well [but] let me go back a bit. Six years ago when I started as CEO, I wrote a strategy paper and said here is what we are going to do around our current business, our adjacent markets, new markets we are going to go after, how we are going to attack them and where the channels sit. I wrote this thing as a six chapter play book and I put a strategy in place.

Once a year I stand up and talk about the strategy and I get accused of not being very good at making slides because it [has been] the same deck for the same six years. It is very consistent.

I think what Brocade One did was basically… take an internal document and try to make it externally digestible.

So the things that I wrote – the strategy statement – were the internal document. Brocade One is the external statement and we have stayed pretty true to form.

It is interesting what a good recession will do. People are up for change.

When I talk to customers, their world is way too complex. I focus a lot on one of the four things that are part of Brocade One that will resonate with them. If it doesn’t, then I usually move on because this is how we run the business.

If they go "My life is upside down and it is massively complex," I will say "Let’s focus on that." If it is building a brand new datacentre, I will focus on a different attribute around thought leadership. If it is "How do I get from point a to point b whilst taking 20 per cent of my costs down?" then I will talk about investment protection.

It is a pretty good baseline of what we are but, more importantly, what we are not going to do. I think it is good and everyone in the company knows that. When an engineer designs a product we will ask if it meets the criteria of investment protection. For example if I can’t connect with a Cisco box… then you have eliminated 70 per cent of the market. So the answer is no, go fix it or we don’t do it.

Brocade places a great deal of emphasis on openness. Why have you gone down that route?

I look at it as the heritage of Brocade. If you look at the most complex, largest datacentres in the world, we are at the heart of it, we are dead centre of it. So we have earned the reputation of building high quality, robust products to meet customer needs.

In the Ethernet world it is a little different. How do you stand apart and stand out? What we would like to do is get standards in place that anyone can write to and take the reputation of high-quality, innovative and thought leadership out of the datacentre world and bring it across the entire enterprise.

I like to compete because I have got a good reputation from that standpoint. Personally, open standards means bigger markets typically and, in the space we are in, I think it makes for more rapid adoption. There are areas that aren’t open and areas where you can wait for people to adopt a standard but if they are not going to come along you go ahead.

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