Bangalore, India April 15, 2015 – Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) today announced that it is making new investments in India as an additional base to support the company’s New IP innovations. Brocade announced the opening of a new state-of-the-art Development Center in Bangalore, and stated it will invest US$300 million in India over the next five years. The new Center reaffirms Brocade’s commitment to accelerating growth in one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, and will play an important role in the development of networking innovations based on the New IP architecture.

Brocade believes India is the ideal test bed for the New IP architecture as enterprises and service providers in India are receptive to open standards and are well positioned to leap directly to the New IP technologies over proprietary, legacy networking equipment. The Center will enable Brocade India to showcase proofs-of-concept and pilot projects for customers and partners—while contributing to the development of next-generation, fabric-based and software networking solutions. The Center will also work closely with Brocade technology and solution partners and networking industry thought leaders across India, enabling the company to achieve greater penetration in industry verticals such as service providers, media, banking and finance, education, and the public sector.

In line with Brocade’s plans to advance its leadership in these emerging and transformative technology areas, it will add new capacity in the India operations and effectively grow its development team in India, while expanding its sales force to support market growth.  India is also home to the engineering teams of two recent Brocade acquisitions—Vistapointe and Connectem—making India a keystone in the company’s overall growth plan and extending its leadership in software networking and virtualized network functions, critical technical components in New IP networks.

“Brocade is taking focused and purposeful steps in our global investment strategy with acquisitions that increase our depth in software networking, and strengthen our footprint and engineering capability in markets where we see growth potential,” said Brocade CEO Lloyd Carney. “We believe India will be an early adopter of New IP technologies, and we are very excited to be in this next phase of Brocade’s growth in India.”

According to Gartner, the Indian data center infrastructure market, comprising server, storage, and networking equipment, will reach US$2.03 billion in 2015—making India the second-largest market for data center infrastructure and the second-fastest-growing market in Asia Pacific. Separately, the new Indian Government is investing US$19 billion between 2014-18 for the “Digital India” program, with a significant spend on the network in a directive to build State Wide Area Networks (SWANs), new data centers in each state, smart cities, and a cloud-based platform to drive connectivity for all 1.3 billion citizens.

“The India market is going through a dramatic transformation with investments in private cloud, public cloud, as well as a network refresh due to the 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet adoption across the enterprise, government, and other sectors,” said Edgar Dias, regional director for Brocade India. “Brocade plays beautifully in the sweet spot of this demand, and we have been registering strong momentum in the adoption of our next-generation networking solutions across multiple industry verticals in India.”

The new 157,000 square foot Brocade Bangalore Development Center features modern work environments, state-of-the-art engineering labs and a customer demonstration,briefing, and training center. The LEED Gold-certified building is energy-efficient, making extensive use of green products and water efficiency.