Load Balancer

A protracted legal battle lasting three weeks was the price that Brocade (News - Alert) paid to protect its patents and trade secrets in court recently, but the battle was well worth it, as Brocade won its battle against A10 Networks over a line of load balancing technology.

The legal battle stemmed from a dispute between Brocade and A10 Networks (News - Alert) over intellectual property issues, as well as trade secret infringement. Brocade believed that A10 Networks was infringing on Brocade's property and trade secrets. Given that A10 Networks was founded by Lee Chen (News - Alert), formerly of Foundry Networks--which in turn Brocade had acquired back in 2008--it wasn't an unreasonable suggestion. More specifically, Brocade targeted the A10 Networks' AX Series load balancers with infringement claims, and also made note of the use of four trade secrets in the AX Series, related to the Brocade ServerIron line.

The Brocade ADX Series maximizes availability and provides non-stop delivery of business-critical applications and infrastructure systems (such as DNS, firewall and caching) within single or distributed locations by using a range of advanced local and global traffic management (Global Server Load Balancing) features, high-availability methodologies and intelligent application health monitoring with multiprotocol support.

A jury agreed with Brocade, and also said that there was "unfair competition based on interference with the contract of an engineer while he was employed at Foundry Networks (News - Alert)." According to Brocade, the jury awarded $112 million to the company.

A10 Networks, meanwhile, had a much different view of the results of the trial, saying that the jury in fact found "no liability for most of the copyright claims and certain state-law claims and no willful patent infringement, and finding damages of only $1 for the trade-secret claims and interference-with-contract claims." A10 Networks asserts that only $60 million was assessed.

As for an explanation as to why the amounts so wildly diverged, no one could quite tell. Oddly enough, neither A10 Networks nor Brocade could produce a copy of the jury verdict form that would have spelled out, clearly, just how much was awarded in damages and to whom it was awarded.

Though the divergence in damages owed is bizarre to say the least, one thing is clear. Whether the damages were $60 million or $112 million, Brocade came out ahead and successfully defended its intellectual property.

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