Brocade, the switch company, is buying Vyatta, a company that pioneered the idea of open-source routing software, in a bid to compete in the networking world as software-defined networking severs the link between networking software and the box that it sits on. Brocade, the networking and switch company, is buying Vyatta, a company that pioneered the idea of open-source routing software,  in a bid to compete in a networking world where software-defined networking severs the link between networking software and the box that it sits on.Brocade has been a proponent of Open Flow, the protocol that separates the management of packets in a network