Voltaire (NASDAQ:VOLT) will help deliver extreme performance for HP Oracle's Database Machine. The machine was unveiled yesterday by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, as part of his company's efforts to compete in the servers market for organizational data warehouses. The new machine combines Hewlett Packard's hardware with Oracle Corporation's databases.
In order to enhance the relevance of the new product the company looks to provide better performance. This will be attempted by using Voltaire's InfiniBand switches. Oracle will integrate four such switches into each rack of servers for rapid communications based on InfiniBand.
While it remains too early to tell whether Oracle's new initiative will be a success, the selection of Voltaire's switches is a significant triumph for the Israeli company. Cooperation between Voltaire and both HP and Oracle is not a new development. HP is one of Voltaire's largest customers, while Oracle is one of the largest users of Voltaire's communications switches for the organizational applications and databases that it provides.
There has always been a battle between suppliers such as Voltaire and semiconductor-based InfiniBand provider Mellanox Technologies for the software market in order to build applications adapted to new capabilities. Oracle has realized this vision with Voltaire as a central partner and claims a performance ten times faster than other systems.
According to Voltaire VP for strategic cooperation Asaf Somekh, the cooperation with Oracle has been in the works for a year.
"All of their capability to reach such a high level of performance is because they can take advantage of our InfiniBand technology," Voltaire chairman & CEO Ronnie Kenneth told "Globes". There is likely to be major significance for Voltaire for each rack of servers sold by Oracle and HP will contain four of Voltaire's switches."
It is still difficult to translate the significance for Voltaire into numbers but the company's sales efforts will receive a substantial boost following this announcement. Voltaire's shares stood at $4.08 per share during morning trading on Nasdaq today reflecting a market cap of $83.44 million, a drop of about 40% since the start of 2008.
"Every time Oracle sells this equipment, Voltaire's till will ring," said Kenneth. "We estimate that this will have a very significant influence on our future sales, although it is not something which we can yet quantify. From our point of view we have very high expectations."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on September 25, 2008
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