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Globes, Tel Aviv, Israel, Shlomi Cohen column [Globes, Tel Aviv, Israel]
[June 07, 2011]

Globes, Tel Aviv, Israel, Shlomi Cohen column [Globes, Tel Aviv, Israel]


(Globes (Tel Aviv) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) June 07--They say that Apple, which had nearly $70 billion cash at the end of the quarter, has invested billions of dollars in its computing and storage infrastructure so that its iCloud servers will work without problems. There are bad memories of the long disruption to Amazon's cloud service, a disruption which hit the businesses of many companies. It seems to me that the launch of iCloud will cause an acceleration of investment in cloud computing infrastructures at Apple's competitors later in the year, beyond what they have already planned, and that when this happens, there will be several Israeli companies "in the clouds".



In securing the cloud, there is Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: CHKP); in fast communications between cloud servers there is Mellanox Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq:MLNX; TASE:MLNX); in load management, and security also, there is Radware Ltd. (Nasdaq: RDWR), and in the niche of fast, smart access to different databases in real time there is Attunity (Nasdaq: ATTU).

As far as Mellanox is concerned, in the presentations by managers from HP (HPQ) and Oracle (ORCL) at the company's analysts day on Friday, we saw how these two gorillas, with no love lost between them, each separately chose Mellanox's technologies for the cloud computing solutions they offer their customers. In load management too we will see later on in the year that Radware's solutions have been chosen by several gorillas as part of their cloud computing solutions.


Attunity has also been working for many years with several gorillas separately, but only the two agreements it recently signed with Microsoft (MSFT), for its cloud computing platforms, have finally rescued it from a situation of financial intensive care to general independence.

Within a few weeks, Attunity will receive a $3.5 million advance from Microsoft, and putting that together with the small amount of cash it already has, and the operational profitability it has reported for many quarters now, it will be possible to declare Attunity a debt-free company, after many years.

The financial turnaround would not have happened at Attunity this year if cloud computing had not come into the world to meet the integration technologies the company has developed over decades but has never known exactly what do with. They never fitted any application as perfectly as they now fit cloud computing applications, which it seems have saved the company. To what degree Attunity will take off from here mainly depends on the rate of growth of cloud computing in general, and of cloud computing at Microsoft in particular.

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Copyright (c) 2011, Globes, Tel Aviv, Israel Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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