Telecom Lead America: Brocade has won the intellectual
property infringement and unfair competition case against A10 Networks. A San
Jose federal court jury returned its verdict and found A10 responsible for
broad-based intellectual property infringement and unfair competition.
The federal court has also awarded approximately $112
million to Brocade. In addition to that, the jury awarded punitive damages
against A10 and also personally against its CEO Lee Chen, strongly condemning
Chen and A10’s unfair competition.
Speaking on the verdict, Tyler Wall, general counsel at
Brocade said the company is grateful for the jury’s service and close attention
to the evidence. Brocade stands firm in its commitment to protect its
intellectual property assets and our innovation.
The jury found that the A10 AX Series line of load
balancers infringe on Brocade’s technologies for Global Server Load Balancing
and High Availability.
In addition, the jury found misappropriation of four
trade secrets involving techniques used in the Brocade ServerIron products that
A10 applied for use in its AX series.
A10 products also copied proprietary Brocade code used in
Brocade’s ServerIron products.
The jury also found unfair competition based on
interference with the contract of an engineer while he was employed at Foundry
Networks (which Brocade acquired in late 2008).
Brocade leads Fibre Channel Switch market; Cisco dominates Data
Center Equipment space
In the Fibre Channel SAN switch
space, Brocade is leading with 70 percent revenue market share,
according to Infonetics Research.
