"I don't know if anyone relishes competing with Cisco on a day-to-day basis," Stevens said in an interview with Network World.

Brocade is already the top player by market share in the modular SAN switch market, ahead of second-place Cisco. (Compare .) Acquiring Foundry and its switching and routing technology gives Brocade a foothold in the enterprise LAN and service provider markets.

"The industry is ready for a second viable player that's able to deliver an end-to-end solution," Stevens says. "Foundry has a very broad product portfolio. For the markets we're attacking, I don't see any major product gaps."

Stevens was vice president and CTO of Brocade Transport Systems in 2003 and 2004, a position he gained when Brocade acquired Rhapsody Networks, where he had been vice president of business development.

Stevens left Brocade in the second half of 2004 to found the network security company . Stevens was CEO until leaving in June. "I'm a technology guy," he says when asked why he left Palo Alto. "I like the stage of the company where you go from two guys at a card table up to having three or four sales teams and doing a couple million dollars per quarter."