Mellanox Q2FY10 Earnings: Blasting thru the Macro

Yesterday Mellanox announced second quarter revenues of $25.3 million for the period ended June 30, 2009. The company's results shine brilliantly through dreary global economic conditions that are smothering their competitors.  After declining for two consecutive quarters that correspond with the bail-out period; Mellanox revenue bounced back onto the growth track with a strong 12% quarter over quarter increase.

The performance by Mellanox reinforces my belief that results posted by Qlogic one day earlier were not all about "the macro."  Doing business side-by-side in the same macro-economic conditions, increasing Mellanox revenue reflects a growing InfiniBand market while slowing Qlogic revenue reflects a declining Fibre Channel market.

Highlighted on the Mellanox earnings call was the continued penetration of InfiniBand; the contribution of new products and the outlook for next quarter and beyond.

According to Mellanox, revenue from new 40 gigabit per second Quad Data Rate InfiniBand increased from 34% of total revenue in Q1 to 56% of total revenue in Q2. I believe this underscores the performance advantage of InfiniBand and why at least 50% of technical HPC clusters have already deployed the technology.  I expect QDR technology to give InfiniBand vendors a boost for the next year or two against low-latency Ethernet and open doors in high performance business computing environments such as trading.

Management also talked about several new products including InfiniBand switches and Ethernet adapters. Most interesting to me was a response from management to a question about contributions from switches. They claimed that revenue from switches was over 20% of total revenue.  That means revenue from switches was almost $7 million which would vault Mellanox from low double digit market share in InfiniBand switches into the 20-30% market share range.  This run-rate also positions Mellanox within striking distance of the $7-8 million per quarter it will take to become the market leader.  Given that Qlogic reported that sales of its network products (switches) were flat over last quarter, the InfiniBand switch market has expanded or Mellanox has taken market share from Sun and Voltaire.  We'll know some of the answer when Voltaire announces next week.

Looking into the future, Mellanox guidance for next quarter is $28.5M to $29M, up 12.6% to 14.6%.  It appears Mellanox is hitting on all cylinders right now.  Their dominance of the InfiniBand adapter business remains unopposed, their strategy to sell switch subsystems is succeeding and they have introduced innovative Ethernet technology that could materially add to their success in the future.

To view Mellanox InfiniBand market share as of Q1CY09, visit www.itbrandpulse.com.