Mellanox Technologies Ltd. () was an

Israel Israel, officially the State of Israel, is a country in West Asia. It Borders of Israel, shares borders with Lebanon to the north, Syria to the north-east, Jordan to the east, Egypt to the south-west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. Isr ...

i-American multinational supplier of computer networking products based on

InfiniBand InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also used ...

and

Ethernet Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

technology. Mellanox offered adapters, switches, software, cables and silicon for markets including

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) is the use of supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into ...

data center A data center is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. Since IT operations are crucial for busines ...

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

computer data storage Computer data storage or digital data storage is a technology consisting of computer components and Data storage, recording media that are used to retain digital data. It is a core function and fundamental component of computers. The cent ...

and financial services. On March 11, 2019,

Nvidia Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...

announced its intent to acquire the company for $6.9 billion. The deal closed on April 27, 2020, with approval from the EU, U.S. and Chinese antitrust authorities. The company was integrated into Nvidia's networking division in 2020 and Nvidia stopped using the brand name "Mellanox" for its new networking products.

History

1999–2009

Mellanox was founded in May 1999 by former Israeli executives of Intel Corporation and Galileo Technology (which was acquired by

Marvell Technology Group Marvell Technology, Inc. is an American company, headquartered in Santa Clara, California, which develops and produces semiconductors and related technology. Founded in 1995, the company had more than 6,500 employees as of 2024, with over 10,000 ...

in October 2000 for $2.8 billion) Eyal Waldman, Shai Cohen, Roni Ashuri, Michael Kagan, Evelyn Landman, Eitan Zahavi, Shimon Rottenberg, Udi Katz and Alon Webman. Eyal Waldman founded Mellanox in the Israel city of

Yokneam Illit Yokneam Illit (), also Yoqne'am Illit, is a city in the Northern District of Israel. It is located in a hilly region of the Lower Galilee at the base of the Carmel Mountains, and overlooks the Jezreel Valley. It is from Haifa and from Tel Av ...

. Financial offices were in

Santa Clara, California Santa Clara ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for "Clare of Assisi, Saint Clare") is a city in Santa Clara County, California. The city's population was 127,647 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, making it the List of cities and towns i ...

in the USA. In February, 2002, a round of

venture capital Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to start-up company, startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in ...

investment was announced of about $56 million. Later extended to about $64 million, investors included

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

Sequoia Capital Sequoia Capital Operations, LLC is an American venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California, specializing in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. the firm had appro ...

and U.S. Venture Partners, Mellanox had its

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investm ...

in February, 2007, on

NASDAQ The Nasdaq Stock Market (; National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the U.S. by volume, and ranked second on the list ...

that raised $102 million, and valued the company at over half a billion dollars. Its shares were listed under the symbol MLNX. Created in 2009, Mellanox's investment fund was publicly announced in 2014. Initially founded as an

integrated circuit An integrated circuit (IC), also known as a microchip or simply chip, is a set of electronic circuits, consisting of various electronic components (such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors) and their interconnections. These components a ...

(chip) manufacturer, it evolved into a producer of complete network systems by 2009.

2010–2016

In 2010,

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American Multinational corporation, multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, who remains executive chairman, Oracle was ...

became a major investor in the company, holding around 10% of its stock. Oracle uses InfiniBand technology in its

Exadata Oracle Exadata (Exadata) is a computing system optimized for running Oracle Databases. Exadata is a combined database machine and software platform that includes scale-out x86-64 compute and storage servers, RoCE networking, RDMA-addressable ...

and Exalogic appliances. Stock shares were also listed on the

Tel Aviv Stock Exchange The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE; ), colloquially known as The Bursa, is the only public stock exchange in Israel and a public company itself, listed on its own exchange since August 1, 2019. It is regulated by the ''Securities Law (1968)'' a ...

, until 2013 when the company de-listed itself, but remained on NASDAQ. In February 2011, Mellanox acquired Voltaire Ltd., a provider of data center switches for about $218 million. In November 2012, Mellanox was named one of the fastest growing companies by a marketing firm. In 2013 Mellanox acquired

assets In financial accounting, an asset is any resource owned or controlled by a business or an economic entity. It is anything (tangible or intangible) that can be used to produce positive economic value. Assets represent value of ownership that can b ...

of XLoom Communications Ltd., including opto-electric chip-scale packaging, and some of XLoom's technology personnel. In July 2013, Mellanox acquired privately held Kotura, Inc., a developer of

silicon photonics Silicon photonics is the study and application of photonic systems which use silicon as an optical medium. The silicon is usually patterned with sub-micrometre precision, into microphotonic components. These operate in the infrared, most commo ...

optical interconnect technology for high-speed networking. In July 2013, Mellanox acquired privately held IPtronics A/S, a designer of optical interconnect components for digital communications. In July 2014, Mellanox acquired privately held Integrity Project, for its software connectivity, low-level development, real-time applications and security technology. In February 2016, Mellanox acquired publicly held EZchip Semiconductor, a provider of

network processor A network processor is an integrated circuit which has a feature set specifically targeted at the Computer networking, networking application domain. Network processors are typically software programmable devices and would have generic characteri ...

s and multi-core processors from EZchip's earlier acquisition of Tilera. In 2016, Mellanox Technologies began to employ programmers in the

Gaza Strip The Gaza Strip, also known simply as Gaza, is a small territory located on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea; it is the smaller of the two Palestinian territories, the other being the West Bank, that make up the State of Palestine. I ...

, in addition to its team of

Israeli Arab The Arab citizens of Israel form the country's largest ethnic minority. Their community mainly consists of former Palestinian Citizenship Order 1925, Mandatory Palestine citizens (and their descendants) who continued to inhabit the territory ...

programmers and programmers in Ramallah and Nablus. In 2016, Mellanox had revenues of $857 million. In December 2017, Mellanox announced it would start a new startup accelerator. Over 2017, shares in the company rose by 55 percent. That year, the company also made its largest acquisition with EZchip.

2018–acquisition

The activist investor Starboard Value LP purchased a 10.7% stake in the company in November 2017. In January 2018, Starboard criticized the company's research and development spending and argued for short-term profits instead. The day after, on January 9, 2018, Mellanox announced it would immediately discontinue its 1550 nm silicon photonics development activities, with president and CEO Eyal Waldman saying the review of the silicon photonics business had started in May 2017. Mellanox also said it would fire 100 people, all in the US. At the time, the company employed 2,900 people, mostly in Israel. In a "board battle," Starboard sent a letter to shareholders asking them to entirely replace the board of directors. At the time, Mellanox had a $3.3 billion market value. Starboard said it would nominate nine candidates for election to the company's board, including Starboard head Jeffrey Smith. In May, 2018, stockholders approved the company's governance proposals related to the possibility of the contested board elections. By June, 2018, three board members agreed to step down and be replaced by two Starboard candidates and one agreed upon by both sides. In 2019, Mellanox was acquired for $6.9 billion by Nvidia Corporation making it one of the largest

mergers and acquisitions Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are business transactions in which the ownership of a company, business organization, or one of their operating units is transferred to or consolidated with another entity. They may happen through direct absorpt ...

in 2019. Other companies willing to acquire Mellanox were

Xilinx Xilinx, Inc. ( ) was an American technology and semiconductor company that primarily supplied programmable logic devices. The company is renowned for inventing the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array (FPGA). It also pioneered ...

and

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

. Founder and long-term CEO Eyal Waldman left the company in November, 2020. He made an estimated $240 million on the acquisition.

Products and market

Mellanox was a

fabless semiconductor company Fabless manufacturing is the design and sale of hardware devices and semiconductor chips while outsourcing their fabrication (or ''fab'') to a specialized manufacturer called a semiconductor foundry. These foundries are typically, but not exclu ...

, which then sold products based on those semiconductor

s. Starting from at least 2011, its chips were produced by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (TSMC). Mellanox Technologies provided Ethernet and InfiniBand network adapters,

switches In electrical engineering, a switch is an electrical component that can disconnect or connect the conducting path in an electrical circuit, interrupting the electric current or diverting it from one conductor to another. The most common type o ...

and cables for servers and storage used in cloud and enterprise

data centers A data center is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer, computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and computer data storage, storage systems. Since IT opera ...

based on internally developed integrated circuits. Mellanox had two major customers,

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

and

Dell EMC EMC Corporation (stylized as EMC²) was an American multinational corporation headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, which sold data storage, information security, virtualization, analytics, cloud computing and other products and services th ...

, which each contributed more than 10% of revenues in 2017, 2018, and 2019. Mellanox specialized in switched fabrics for enterprise data centers and

high performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) is the use of supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into ...

, when high data rates and low latency are required such as in a

computer cluster A computer cluster is a set of computers that work together so that they can be viewed as a single system. Unlike grid computers, computer clusters have each node set to perform the same task, controlled and scheduled by software. The newes ...

. One typical application was a large

database management system In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and an ...

. Mellanox network adapter and switches supported

remote direct memory access In computing, remote direct memory access (RDMA) is a direct memory access from the memory of one computer into that of another without involving either one's operating system. This permits high-throughput, low- latency networking, which is especia ...

(RDMA) and

RDMA over Converged Ethernet RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) is a network protocol which allows remote direct memory access (RDMA) over an Ethernet network. There are multiple RoCE versions. RoCE v1 is an Ethernet link layer protocol and hence allows communication between ...

. Product names included: *The ConnectX product family of multi-protocol ASICs and adapters supports virtual protocol interconnect (VPI), enabling support for both Ethernet and InfiniBand traffic at speeds up to 200 Gbit/s. The ConnectX-6, and ConnectX-6 Dx adapters have enhanced capabilities such as high speed (up to 200 Gb per second), OVS acceleration, Multi-Host support, and inline crypto acceleration. *The ConnectX architecture has been described as "novel", with excellent performance that is "very well suited for modern

multi-core A multi-core processor (MCP) is a microprocessor on a single integrated circuit (IC) with two or more separate central processing units (CPUs), called ''cores'' to emphasize their multiplicity (for example, ''dual-core'' or ''quad-core''). Ea ...

platforms". The Quantum family of InfiniBand switches supports up to 40 ports running at HDR 200 Gbit/s. The Quantum switches offer un-matched latency and packet forwarding performance and support advanced HPC offloads including SHARP (collective operation acceleration) and SHIELD (self-healing) technologies. *The Spectrum product family of Ethernet switches. *The LinkX product family of cables and transceivers. These products are available for both Ethernet and InfiniBand protocols and various form factors.

High-performance computing

By 2011, Mellanox's InfiniBand products for

s had been deployed in many of the

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

lists of high-performance computers.

Storage

Although originally associated with InfiniBand products, Mellanox was later able to use its technology for

storage area network A storage area network (SAN) or storage network is a computer network which provides access to consolidated, block device, block-level data storage. SANs are primarily used to access Computer data storage, data storage devices, such as disk ...

s (SANs), to replace legacy

Fibre Channel Fibre Channel (FC) is a high-speed data transfer protocol providing in-order, lossless delivery of raw block data. Fibre Channel is primarily used to connect computer data storage to Server (computing), servers in storage area networks (SAN) in ...

for example with the much more common

family of standards, since 2011.

Operations

In addition to its headquarters in the US, Mellanox had offices in Israel, Denmark, China, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan and the United Kingdom.

Support of the Palestinian Tech Economy

Mellanox outsourced some of its engineering to the

West Bank The West Bank is located on the western bank of the Jordan River and is the larger of the two Palestinian territories (the other being the Gaza Strip) that make up the State of Palestine. A landlocked territory near the coast of the Mediter ...

. Rather than setting up offshore engineering centers in the Far East or Eastern Europe, Mellanox hired Palestinian engineers from

Ramallah Ramallah ( , ; ) is a Palestinians, Palestinian city in the central West Bank, that serves as the administrative capital of the State of Palestine. It is situated on the Judaean Mountains, north of Jerusalem, at an average elevation of abov ...

through a Palestinian outsourcing firm. In 2018, Waldman told a Tel Aviv conference hosted by '' Globes'' magazine that over 100 Palestinians are working on Mellanox projects. Waldman had previously talked about Mellanox's plans to build a research and development center in Ramallah, even though it is more expensive than outsourcing to Eastern Europe.

References

External links

* {{authority control Technology companies of Israel Defunct computer hardware companies Israeli companies established in 1999 2007 initial public offerings 2020 mergers and acquisitions American brands Companies based in Sunnyvale, California Companies formerly listed on the Nasdaq Electronics companies established in 1999 Manufacturing companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Mergers and acquisitions of Israeli companies Networking companies of the United States Networking hardware companies Nvidia Technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Telecommunications equipment vendors Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer companies of Israel