Dolphin Interconnect Solutions ASA of Oslo, Norway and StarGen Inc. of Marlborough, Ma, announced today that they have signed an agreement to merge their business activities. The transaction is based on 2.525.000 Dolphin shares giving StarGen shareholders 22% of the company after the transaction. The business combination is a natural step to fulfill both companies common vision for delivering high performance interconnect infrastructure for servers, clusters, storage and embedded markets.
The combined Dolphin and StarGen will provide a product range that leverages the expertise of both companies and addresses the needs of several markets. Dolphin is an industry recognized leader in high performance interconnect solutions for processors and StarGen has pioneered innovative value-add interconnect solutions for IO. The combination will be unmatched in the industry in the ability to meet all of customer’s interconnect needs. The combination’s products will cover applications spanning embedded solutions for printers to large-scale multiprocessing systems for mission and business critical applications. StarGen’s new enhanced PCI Express products will utilize Dolphin’s SuperSocketsTM software to provide seamless integration of applications running standard communication protocols including TCP/IP, Sockets, MPI, and RDS. PCI Express has become the default high-speed interconnect technology for computers and peripherals. By providing enhanced capabilities directly to the PCI Express domain, the combined companies can deliver more efficient solutions with wider applicability than competing interconnect technologies. New product announcements and releases can be expected within first half of 2007.
StarGen’s currently shipping StarFabric products have been adopted by a wide variety of Tier 1 and Tier 2 customers and are used for applications such as Test & Measurement, Medical, Storage, Video Display, and Printer solutions. StarFabric will continue as an integral part of the combined company. StarGen has 13 employees and a worldwide sales network consisting of direct representatives as well as manufacturer representatives and distributors.
Kåre Løchsen, Dolphin CEO, said, “The merger represents a perfect strategic match creating a company capable of delivering a wide range of server infrastructure products. StarGen’s enhanced PCI Express products combined with Dolphin’s SuperSockets software will enable us to bring a new generation of interconnect products to the market. Dolphin and StarGen’s products are complementary with very similar architectures, and together with SuperSockets, customers can deploy applications on the new products without reprogramming. We believe this merger will bring about a remarkable new product line for the server and embedded markets with an accelerated time schedule. The new product line matches ideally with Dolphin’s NumaChip to provide a comprehensive offering of infrastructure products for the server market. The merger also gives us a stronger foothold in the US and Asian markets that are the largest established marketplaces in the world as well as the fastest growing.”
Tim Miller, StarGen CEO said, “When we met with the Dolphin people we were convinced that we were looking at a very compelling match of products, markets and company cultures. The merged company will represent a much stronger entity in the interconnect market with products and projects that are targeting a key area in the server value chain. We were excited to hear about Dolphin’s SuperSockets software that will enable our enhanced PCI Express products to be adapted immediately in a wide range of application areas. With the NumaChip coming to provide seamless integration of the new multi-core processor chips, we will have offerings that cannot be matched by any other interconnect company.”
About Dolphin Interconnect Solutions Dolphin Interconnect Solutions ASA of Oslo, Norway and Clinton, Massachusetts (USA) provides low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnect products. Dolphin’s interconnect cards have the unique advantage of enabling a direct link from a processor to remote memory in a multiprocessor system. Dolphin products support systems with a PCI, PCI-X or PCI Express bus or carrier and under a variety of operating systems and processors. Dolphin interconnects provide very low overhead communication, extremely low latencies and high throughput, all vital factors for communication that requires frequent transfer of small data packets, like databases and computer-aided engineering. The SuperSocketsTM library is fully transparent to applications making the software/hardware integration very easy. Dolphin products are also used in a wide variety of embedded applications and for cost-effective, highly scalable, computer clusters. Dolphin Interconnect Solutions ASA is a public company listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange (ticker DOLP). Dolphin’s more than 470 shareholders include Selvaag Invest, Rowan Investments Ltd, Den Norske Krigsforsikring for Skib, Danske Fund Norge Vekst, Granada Forvaltning AS, MP Pensjon and KLP Liv. For more information, please visit www.dolphinics.com.
About StarGen
StarGen Inc. of Marlborough, Massachusetts (USA), was founded in 1999 and provides advanced serial switched interconnect solutions for compute, storage and embedded equipment. StarGen has a long history of extending the capabilities of industry standard such as PCI and PCI Express.
StarGen’s currently shipping StarFabric product line benefits vendors of embedded systems needing enhanced switched PCI capability. StarFabric shipments and revenue experienced more than 50% growth in 2006. StarGen is also currently developing products to provide advanced PCI Express capabilities. These products will be ideal solutions for blade server, storage, and embedded applications. StarGen’s switched interconnect products provide a dramatic increase in equipment performance, reliability, and scalability while maintaining backward compatibility to existing standards based PCI and PCI Express hardware and software. StarGen shareholders include Vesbridge Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Ironside Ventures, Eastward Capital Partners, Intel Capital, and Boston University Community Technology Fund. For more information, please visit www.stargen.com.
Note: NumaChipTM, SuperSocketsTM and Dolphin Interconnect Solutions are trademarks of Dolphin Interconnect Solutions ASA. StarFabricTM and StarGenTM are trademarks of StarGen Inc. Other product names are for informational purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective companies.
For further details please contact:
Kåre Lochsen, CEO Dolphin
Phone: + 47 23 16 71 85 or +47 95 08 87 31
Tim Miller, CEO Stargen
Phone: +1 508 786 9950 ext. 103
Alex Gunderson, CFO Dolphin
Phone: + 47 2316 70 08 or +47 4147 4107
Website Dolphin: www.dolphinics.com