Exar Buys Neterion

Exar Corporation and Neterion, Inc. have signed a definitive agreement under which Exar will acquire Neterion, a privately held company based in California. The transaction is expected to close during the current quarter ending in March, 2010.

"The combined capabilities that Exar and Neterion will offer address not only the requirements of today’s data centers but enable critical features for the evolving needs of next generation data centers," said Pete Rodriquez, Exar’s president and chief executive officer. "Neterion is a recognized leader in 10 Gigabit Ethernet network adapter solutions optimized for virtualized data centers with an array of top-tier enterprise server and storage customers. Their product portfolio represents an ideal complement to Exar’s market-leading solutions for hardware accelerated data encryption, compression and deduplication."

"We are very excited to be joining the Exar team," said Todd Oseth, Neterion’s president and chief executive officer. "Exar’s technology portfolio, as well as engineering, marketing, and sales resources, allows a new level of focus on meeting the needs of our customers."

"Today, data centers are tasked with not only expanding their capabilities to meet the demands of more users that have access to more bandwidth and larger data sets, but doing so while managing rising operational costs," said John Williams, Exar’s vice president of Datacom and Storage business. "Neterion’s hardware optimized 10 Gigabit Ethernet V-NIC(TM) adapters provide an optimal platform for IT organizations targeting server consolidation. Exar’s Hifn Technology products provide the capabilities to not only secure those virtual partitions, but to optimize network bandwidth utilization with hardware data compression – all of this with negligible impact to server performance and power."

The purchase price is estimated to be between $10 million and $11 million dollars net of cash received. No other terms of the agreement are being disclosed.