Queen’s spin-out Titan IC bought by Nasdaq-listed Mellanox

Belfast company based in Titanic Quarter says deal will pave way for tech advances

A Nasdaq-listed network specialist has agreed a deal to acquire Queen’s University high-tech spin-out Titan IC, which has developed pioneering technology to accelerate data search and analytics.

Mellanox Technologies, which is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and Yokneam, Israel, did not disclose the value of the deal.

But Eyal Waldman, president and CEO of Mellanox Technologies, said that following the acquisition of Titan IC the company's "M&A investments total more than $1.2 billion to date and more than $53 million dollars invested in start-ups".

Mellanox Technologies, which had revenues of $1.33 billion (€1.19 billion) in 2019, specialises in high-performance interconnect solutions for data centre servers and storage systems.

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The Nasdaq-listed company said the acquisition of Titan IC would help it “strengthen leadership in security and data analytics”.

Titan IC, formed in 2007, has developed pioneering technology called RXP that powers high-speed complex pattern matching and real-time internet traffic inspection for advanced cyber security and data analytics applications.

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According to Mellanox Technologies, the Belfast company, which is headquartered in Catalyst in Titanic Quarter, will become the centre of advanced network intelligence research and development for Mellanox.

Noel McKenna, Titan IC chief executive, believes that the takeover of the Northern Ireland company will pave the way to “advance network intelligence to new levels of performance and insight”.

Mr McKenna said: “We have worked with Mellanox for many years to integrate our RXP regular expression processor into their advanced line of BlueField I/O Processing Units (IPUs).

“Now as part of Mellanox, we will be able to achieve new capabilities for cyber intelligence, intrusion detection and protection, and advanced data analytics applications.”

The latest set of published accounts for Titan IC show the company had eight directors, with Mr McKenna listed as a person of “significant control”.

Francess McDonnell

Francess McDonnell

Francess McDonnell is a contributor to The Irish Times specialising in business