The SF Federal Attorney is 2 and 0 on these backdating prosecutions. Stephanie Jensen, former VP of HR, said she didn’t know what she was doing was wrong, but the prosecution noted that she cautioned staffers not to email about it. The jury took a day to return a verdict. She faces up to 20 years in prison for one count of fraud and one count of falsifying records.

Former CEO Greg Reyes is still awaiting sentencing on his conviction for 10 felony charges. Jensen’s conviction isn’t good news for him.

Brocade’s marketing nailed by the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog
On a lighter note, the WSJ Law Blog had this comment on Brocade’s marketing:

Law Blog Corporate Self-Description of the Day: So we’ve done a little bit of reporting on backdating at technology companies, and we have to admit: for the most part, we have no understanding of what it is these companies do. We took a look at the Brocade Web site to gain some understanding. Here’s what we learned:

“Brocade provides key building-blocks for architecting and simplifying IT infrastructures to increase resource utilization, improve productivity, and maximize ROI.”

You can bet we’ll be dropping that into our holiday cocktail-party chat ASAP.

Much classier than shouting “party’s over!”

Seriously
What does Brocade do? Yeah, they build FC switches. But with 10 gigE coming in, and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) coming in, that won’t be a growth business. Do you really want to compete with Cisco and Juniper in the Ethernet switch business?

How about storage connectivity? Maybe. Like QLogic, who took an enormous hit when Wall Street realized FC was over, Brocade is grappling with the post-FC world. More on that later.

The problem with Brocade’s self-description is that it could apply to dozens of technology firms – and does. Faster, better, cheaper is what everyone in Silicon Valley does. Working some of the “how” into it makes for a better and more memorable story.

And differentiates you from everyone else who claims the same thing.

Comments welcome. If you start seeing law firm ads here, that is Google’s doing, not mine.