Combined with the social environment, this is the biggest driver of business in routers. Brocade has a limited window of opportunity with the MLX to be the market leader, as it can reasonably be expected that within a year somebody will have a better, cheaper router on the market. This implies that the pace of technological change is a threat to Brocade, yet it is actually an opportunity, with Brocade being the technologically superior company today. If it can maintain its technological leadership, Brocade will be to be able to grow its business steadily over the coming years.
The legal environment is not particularly challenging for Brocade. The company is not subject to any major legal action. The biggest difficult that Brocade has is protecting its intellectual property rights overseas. Brocade will need to manage its patents effectively in order to maintain these rights, which are essential to the company maintaining its technological competitive advantage. The environmental environment is not a major issue, although there is some concern with wastage from consumer electronic goods. This concern, however, has failed as of yet to manifest itself as a major direct threat to Brocade.
The most significant threat to Brocade, however, is that of competition. The company faces two larger, more well-financed competitors in Cisco and Juniper. In addition, there are a number of low cost producers, mainly in Asia, that are undercutting the MLX product as well. The position of the MLX is as a value proposition, with high quality at a low price, yet to be realistic, there are higher quality routers and there are lower-priced routers as well. Thus, Brocade must be very careful with respect to its competitive positioning. This implies that it must address carefully the threat posed by technological change and it must also be willing to engage in a little bit of price competition as well. There is a fine line with this strategy that Brocade will either price so low as to lose money or price so high as to reduce its market share potential.
It is also worth noting the threat represented by the economy. Even if Brocade outflanks...
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