Mellanox Technologies to acquire EZchip for $811M

Mellanox Technologies plans to acquire networking chip company EZchip Semiconductor in a deal worth U.S. $811 million.

Eyal Waldman

Mellanox makes InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnection platforms and products for the data centre while EZchip sells network and multi-core processors that are used in carrier edge routers and enterprise platforms.

EZchip’s customers include Huawei, ZTE, Ericsson, Oracle, Avaya and Cisco Systems.

“Mellanox needs to diversify its business; it is still heavily dependent on the high-performance computing market and InfiniBand,” says Bob Wheeler, principal analyst, networking at market research firm The Linley Group. “EZchip helps move Mellanox into markets and customers that it would not have access to with its existing products.”

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EZchip targets multi-core processing with Tilera purchase

Network processor specialist, EZchip Semiconductor, is to acquire Tilera. The deal is valued at $130 million in cash: $50 million when the deal closes, and up to $80 million more depending on performance targets being met. 

Bob Wheeler, The Linley Group

Tilera's products include multi-core processors, intelligent network interface cards (NICs) and one rack-unit (1RU) network - 'whitebox' - appliances used for security applications.

Acquiring Tilera will broaden EZchip's market. Tilera's devices are used for network appliances, enterprise routers, cloud computing, video and voice encoders, security, deep-packet inspection, load-balancing, and emerging applications such as software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV). 

EZchip's first acquisition will also broaden the company's US presence and customers: Tilera has 100 customers including Brocade, Check Point Software Technologies, Cisco, Fujitsu, Harmonic, MikroTik and ZTE.

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