Israel Innovation 2.0

Earlier this week, Israel-based VeNotion Technologies, an innovative Business ServiceWare software solutions provider, and Software AG, a leading business infrastructure software company, announced the signing of a technology partnership agreement to integrate
Software AG’s SOA technology with
VeNotion’s automated SOA Business
ServiceWare.

According to the VeNotion website, ServiceWare,

consists of an automated business services and related IT
assets models, assuring software components and SOA services are
organized and managed by business context.

The company’s VeN4 ServiceWare™,

(patent pending) technology enables visibility, use and reuse of the
enterprise business logic and software assets within the SOA initiative.

Enterprise architects working with Software AG’s CentraSite Community Network can integrate VeNotion’s VeN4 ServiceWare™ into it to enable Business ServiceWare that organizes IT and SOA
services by business context.

Company Facts
Founded in 2006.

Avi Kochva, Co-Founder and CEO.

Ronen Yochpaz, Co-Founder and CTO.

Products: VeN4 ServiceWare™.

Website: www.venotion.com.

Related ebizQ and ITGumbo content:
BPM Basics for Dummies: Getting a Read on BPM (archive webinar)
Company in Focus: Magic Software Enterprises Ltd
 

About the author: Lisa Damast is the Membership
Manager of ebizQ.net and currently resides in Israel. Any questions or
inquiries regarding this blog or ebizQ membership services can be
directed to her via email at ldamast (at) ebizq (dot) net. She can also be followed on Twitter, where she covers additional Israeli technology companies and Israel-related headlines and topics.

News:
Last month, enterprise software company, Magic Software Enterprises reported that it earned record revenues for the third quarter of 2007. On the same day, it also announced that Guy Bernstein would replace David Assia as Chairman of the Board.

Background:
According to a company description, Magic Software provides

“enterprise application development, deployment and integration technology. Magic Software’s platform-independent methodology lets companies achieve agility by quickly assembling composite applications, allowing programmers to create services and architects and business analysts to orchestrate and reuse these services to enable business processes. Through partnerships with industry leaders such as IBM and SAP and more than 2500 ISVs worldwide, Magic Software technology is used by more than 1.5 million customers around the globe.”

Headquartered in Israel, Magic Software was founded by David Assia and others in 1986 and was the first company to be co-listed on both the NASDAQ and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE). It is a subsidiary of the Formula Systems and Emblaze Group of companies.

Analysis:
The third quarter is the second consecutive quarter in which Magic Software has had record earnings. Back in August, Timothy Prickett Morgan of ITJungle explained that Magic Software’s high second quarter earnings was the result of “restructuring and revamped product line.”

Since March, Magic has restructured its leadership with changes in its President/CEO, CFO and two new board members. As Assia was also the co-founder and former CEO of Magic Software, last month’s announcement that Chairman David Assia will be replaced by Guy Bernstein marked a strong changing of the guard and the direction of the company away from its management roots.

Accompanying such changes at the top, have been several announcements of high-stake deals and industry recognition. In May, Magic Software achieved IBM business partner specialty designation and a Magic Software subsidiary signed an initial $1.3 million agreement with KLM Cargo in June. In July, it signed its 200th SAP Business One partner and in October made a generous donation of its integration software to Penn State University.

Of course, in addition to Morgan’s reasons for Magic Software’s increased revenue, the information technology industry’s continued mass migration to implement service-oriented architecture (SOA) in recent years has certainly helped increase the demand and sales potentials for Magic Software’s products.

According to the website, Magic Software’s iBOLT Business Integration Suite,

“enables customers to easily design, develop and deploy automated business processes, including Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM).”

Its eDeveloper,

“is a composite applications toolset, delivering an extremely productive, state-of-the-art technology for developing and deploying composite Web and Client/Server applications across and beyond the enterprise.”

Both products shorten the process times and offer to help increase profitability. While providing the means for other companies to increase profitability, Magic Software’s record earnings have helped the company resurface into the black earlier this year and continue its climb. What Magic Software offers and does next in 2008, should be watched closely.

Additional Resources:
The role of composite applications in an SOA
ebizQ.net Webinar: A Guide to Building Composite Applications
Oracle Extends Application Integration Architecture

News:
In the past two weeks, Voltaire, Ltd. has received significant media coverage for being listed at the top of Deloitte’s Fast 500 EMEA list of fastest growing companies and for its recent partnering with Tibco Software, Inc.

Background:
Founded in 1997, Voltaire Ltd. is headquartered in Israel and is fast becoming the leader in high performance grid computing solutions. Voltaire offers storage switching Grid Backbone products based on Infiniband to help improve the speed of information in data centers and HPC environments. According to a company description, “Voltaire’s products leverage InfiniBand technology and include director-class switches, multi-service switches, fixed-port configuration switches, Ethernet and Fibre Channel routers and standards-based driver and management software.” With a rapidly expanding client base, Voltaire has offered its solutions primarily in “enterprise, governmental, research and educational organizations.”

What is InfiniBand?
According to a definition on the InfiniBand Trade Association website,

“InfiniBand is a pervasive, low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnect which requires low processing overhead and is ideal to carry multiple traffic types (clustering, communications, storage, management) over a single connection.”

The site additionally explains that “InfiniBand Architecture is an industry standard, channel-based, switched fabric, interconnect architecture for servers. InfiniBand architecture changes the way servers are built, deployed, and managed.”

Analysis: Infinite possibilities for Voltaire

It’s no secret that Internet use by companies and consumers require more bandwidth for faster-processing and InfiniBand is currently the top technology available to them. With Internet applications containing more and businesses relying on applications more, InfiniBand has been deployed on supercomputers in industries ranging from government and financial services to entertainment.

InfiniBand’s continued expansion in the near future means continued good prospects for Voltaire, whose products are based on the technology. As part of its effort to help maintain this trend and make sure CIOs and data center professionals, among other IT professionals, fully understand it and embrace it, Voltaire is on the steering committee of the InfiniBand Trade Association.

Of course, Voltaire’s main reason for playing an active role in the industry is to get its name out and sell its Grid BackBone software. One of its most popular solutions is the Multiple Grid Director, which allows switches to be “interconnected to form very large high performance clusters and grids that can grow into the thousands of nodes with ‘pay as you grow’ scalability.” Solutions such as this and GridVision Enterprise, have helped form the “backbone” of Voltaire’s 50,612% growth in the past 5 years, propelling it to be the fastest growing company in Deloitte’s Fast 500 EMEA.

Voltaire’s deal with Tibco Software last week “to deliver a high-throughput, low-latency messaging solution for advanced electronic trading environments” in the financial services industry helps ensure that the company will continue to grow at an above average rate and promises to make it one of the leaders in expanding bandwidth solutions in the future.

Additional Resources:
Inside a green data center
New Supercomputer Blasts Off
Sidebar: Is InfiniBand Ready for a Comeback?

The fastest growing company
Voltaire ranked as fastest-growing tech company by Deloitte
3 Israeli Companies Top The EMEA 500 Fastest Growing Technology Companies List!
Voltaire Powers Two of the World’s Top Five Fastest Supercomputers on the New Top500 List

Know of/part of a hot Israeli company (established or start-up) in cleantech, telecom, voip or IT that you think should be covered in “Company in Focus”? Leave a comment and let me know.