Solarflare has exited the 10GBase-T physical-layer (PHY) business by selling its 10GBase-T assets to an unnamed semiconductor foundry. The company will disclose neither the terms of the sale nor the merchant semiconductor company to which it was sold. Nonetheless, Solarflare emphasized in a statement that, "This deal will enable Solarflare's existing 10GBase-T customers to continue to use the company's leading 10GBase-T proucts."
While the company is exiting the 10GBase-T PHY business, by no means is it going away from the 10GBase-T market altogether. Rather, it will now focus its attention on the family of 10-GbE SFP+ and 10GBase-T server adapters it launched last year and the first part of this year. The company says its 10GBase-T adapters, combined with its middleware product OpenLoad, "have created a compelling value proposition for high-frequency traders by reducing latency and increasing message rates for TCP/IP traffic in market data feeds, while maintaining compatibility with customer applications and installed Ethernet and TCP/IP infrastructure."
Solarflare's chief executive officer Russell Stern declared, "We have no reached critical mass. Solarflare will continue to build on its success in the 10GbE server adapter market by growign share in high-frequency trading and HPC segments, and launching solutions targeting the virtualization and big-data segment."
Solarflare referred to this data from World Federation of Exchanges to support the idea that major international equity exchanges and trading houses are under significant competitive pressure to process trades with virtually no latency. Solarflare positions its family of SFP+ and 10GBase-T server adapters to serve this market.