Somebody’s Finally Interested in Buying Brocade

It’s been about three years since Brocade first hired Frank Quattrone’s Qatalyst Partners to help it find a buyer, and now it looks like the company may finally be in play.

“Sources familiar with the matter” tell Reuters that Brocade has received first-round bids from “a handful” of interested buyers.

Who might those parties be? Now that Dell has acquired Force10 Networks and Hewlett-Packard has snapped up 3Com, the list of possible suitors is a bit shorter than it used to be.

So who’s left? IBM remains a candidate and Oracle is always a possibility, regardless of what its CEO has said in the past. And beyond that? Private-equity firms, most likely.

Brocade shares are trading up more than 6 percent on buyout speculation.