Brocade Communications Shares Plunged: What You Need to Know

Although we don't believe in timing the market or panicking over market movements, we do like to keep an eye on big changes -- just in case they're material to our investing thesis.

What: Brocade Communications (Nasdaq: BRCD  ) dropped 33% in intraday trading after announcing earnings would fall short of expectations for its just-completed quarter.

So what: The company, which is scheduled to report its third fiscal quarter on August 18, issued a press release that lowered guidance for the quarter. Brocade is now expecting non-GAAP EPS of $0.08 to $0.09 and revenue of $500 million to $505 million.

Now what: Previous guidance called for non-GAAP EPS of $0.10 to $0.11 and revenue of $540 million to $560 million. Analysts were expecting non-GAAP EPS of $0.11, down from $0.13 in the year-earlier quarter. Management blamed the disappointing results on "weaker-than-expected Storage end-user demand ... [and] lower-than-expected Federal revenue as well as a softer-than-expected IT spending environment." Network equipment competitors Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO  ) and Juniper Networks (Nasdaq: JNPR  ) have also disappointed investors this year, suggesting that the weakness is pervasive rather than just due to market share shifts. Brocade's comment about weak storage demand caused concern about storage pure-play NetApp (Nasdaq: NTAP  ) , which is down 6% in intraday trading today and is also scheduled to release earnings later this month. 

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