Exar Acquires Altior for $5 Million in Initial Consideration

Exar Corporation will acquire the assets of Altior Inc., a privately-held company in Eatontown, NJ with a development center in Bengaluru, India.

The transaction, expected to close on March 22, 2013, includes $5.0 million in initial consideration to be paid in a combination of cash and stock and a three-year earn-out against net revenue contributed by Altior. The impact to the company’s guidance for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2013 is expected to be immaterial.

Founded in 2004 as CebaTech, Altior Inc. designs, develops and markets hardware and software compression solutions for use in big data applications. The company provides FPGA based PCIe cards and compression software that is transparent to the application and enables compression through a plug-and-play lightweight layered file system in the Linux kernel and POSIX compliant file systems.

The Altior AltraFlex family of products with CeDeFS software solution requires minimal integration and enables real-time Hadoop compression and remote replication with hardware acceleration. Storage requirements on each data node in a Hadoop cluster can be reduced by as much as 50%, reducing the cluster TCO without impacting data analytics performance.

"Altior brings new customers and new use cases to the leading position Exar has established in data compression. The success of our data compression business is evident in the growth and profitability we have generated in the first three quarters of fiscal year 2013. Our strength in database compression with the DX1845 series compression cards will be complemented by the addition of Altior’s layered file system translation and plug-and-play operation. The AltraFlex cards and CeDeFS software will expand our opportunity in big data and is expected to increase our penetration and growth in this vibrant market," commented Exar president and CEO Louis DiNardo. "The competency of the Altior team, especially in the area of system software, coupled with the hardware and software competency that we have demonstrated will enhance Exar’s position as a leader in data management solutions."

Ramana Jampala, CEO of Altior, noted: "Exar has built a strong position and a growth business in big data management. Our CeDeFS technology enables compression integration into current applications seamlessly. The solution, when combined with the state-of-the-art Exar hardware compression acceleration, will reduce the disk space, storage I/O barrier, power consumption and overall system cost significantly."