Broadcom’s Brocade buy silences Ruckus

Following Broadcom’s acquisition of Brocade, many have been left scratching their heads over what that means for the future of Ruckus Wireless.

The paltry sums of cash being banded around as the rumoured price of Brocade have been well and truly smashed out the water, as Broadcom moved swiftly to wholly acquire the networking vendor.

The meagre value of $3.5 billion was spouted as Brocade’s market valuation. Well Broadcom well and truly knocked that out the park by agreeing a deal to acquire its Bro for nearer $6 billion, which includes net debt of about $400 million.

Broadcom stated that as part of the deal it plans to divest Brocade’s entire IP networking business – a controversial move given wireless vendor Ruckus was only acquired by Brocade in April, for more than $1 billion.

What this means for the future of Ruckus is unclear, with some sources claiming the Brocade CEO, Lloyd Carney, said they will be working will Broadcom to find a buyer for the IP networking business. If that’s the case, Ruckus will already be looking for a new home – and Telecoms.com got in touch with the wireless vendor to find out what the future has in store. Alas, at the time of writing Ruckus reps were yet to get back to us, but at least we tried! We’ll update this piece if we hear anything from them.

Until we know more, there’s nothing left for us to do but idly speculate what the future has in store. Adtran doesn’t have much wireless stuff, a wireless play through the Brocade/Ruckus IP networking arm would actually make some sense.

It would be too easy to suggest one of the megavendors like Huawei, Ericsson or the acquisitive Nokia – which, BTW, just completely completed the acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent. TBH we thought that was already a done-deal.