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.
But if they don’t say they are faster, better, cheaper, then maybe they are slower, worse[er], and expensiver! They should also state in their self-description that they sell stuff and are “a company”. From their description, I still don’t know if I can buy anything from them and my fistful of money is slumping…dejected…saddened.
Hmmm .
All the convictions in the world don’t mean anything unless they have to give back the money. Of course, the money goes into a forward trust so the convicted parties don’t have it to give back. Lets see, go to prison for 3 years and keep $20 million. Some people would call that a good job.
The disappointment with stock performance is no surprise. Stock price is essentially set but speculative investment. Brokers, very much like used car salesman, try to sell you something that you hope some other person in the future is more gullible than you are now. As an investor, you hope the companies executives came from a good “3 card monty” or shell game background. It like a bad sitcom, only with your money.
Storage networking core interconnect technologies suffers from moore’s law. Capacity now exceeds demand. There is only so much data that you can get to — storage is bottlenecked and the switches have far too much capacity for the amount of data being served. So, sales slow down. That’s what happens when you rely “on the kindness of strangers” for your business.
Challenges in the SMB space, once “someone else’s problem” (the end to end solution) is now everyone’s problem. If storage bandwidth kept up with moore’s law, a single disk drive would be serving data at over a gigabyte per second by now. And, then there would be a market for 10Ge core interconnect.
Nis.ch is so right on “the money”. Brocade’s self description reads like a used car dealer ad. Is this just a bad attempt to personalize and endear the company ?? and to whom ? potential rubes (share holders) ? end users ? judges and prosecutors ? Who approves this stuff before its published ?
For the board’s and the exec’s, they never deserve what they get when they get caught, they deserve more. Only the small fries go to jail, unless the “big cheeses ” are arrogant in front of the jury and can’t make the “common man” play believable. Someone should have mentioned to Stephanie Jensen ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law, unless you get enough money to buy your way out of the jackpot.
For the one’s that get caught, I’ll give them a hanky as they cry to all the way to their forward trust piggy banks and the “big house”.
I sort of feel bad for these small fries, they have to go to jail for doing the same thing their bosses do, but the bosses get off with no jail time and don’t have to give back the money. Judges should be more forgiving during sentencing. After all, if they get caught and convicted, they shouldn’t be held responsible for their actions. In fact, if they don’t steal more than $10 million, they should get off free.
Why ? Just the fact they would take that sort of risk for so little money, get caught and then convicted. That should be proof enough they must be suffering from some sort of diminished mental capacity or suffer from some sort of sociopathic mental defect.