Has Brocade set itself for sale?

According to latest update, Brocade Communications Systems Inc, the networking hardware and software storage company may be up for sale. 

The report suggests that the companies interested in the networking company include Hewlett-Packard and Oracle; however, Brocade has declined to comment on the news.

Brocade designs, manufactures and sells networking solutions and management applications for local, metro and wide area networks, and it has a market-cap of about $3.2 billion. Last year, the company earned $167.1 million on the revenue of $1.5 billion.

Various analysts predict that if Brocade was to sell itself, then the company will place itself in the line of Perot Systems, ACS and Tandberg that reflect an ongoing consolidation in the technology industry.

HP has long partnered with Brocade and Cisco for networking equipment and it seems that buying Brocade would fill the vacuum in HP's offerings for the data center. The networking company‘s switching technology has been fully integrated with HP's BladeSystem architecture.