Mellanox flushes three directors at behest of activist investor Mellanox has come to terms with the activist investor that's been stalking the company since 2017. The battle began last November, when Starboard Value bought into Mellanox and agitated for change, claiming there was a “growing disparity between [Mellanox's] margins, growth, and stock price performance compared to its peer …
So, what can we expect from Mellanox now? Hardware as a Service with annual licensing? Telemetry perhaps? Maybe a little vendor lock in by making drivers etc. proprietary? Of course there would probably be the usual flushing of the R&D staff out the door to raise temporary profits...
Or maybe I've just grown cynical, and when I hear the words "underperforming compared to peers" I assume the worst.
I have installed and configured Mellanox kit for many years. Excellent company and good guys, both on the sales side and the technical support side.
I really, really hope whitepines is wrong. Todays high performance networking gear thrives on openness. On the Infiniband side Mellanox make improvements to their OFED stack which are available on their website but which also filter down to the OFED components which the Linus distributions use.
I hope I'm wrong too. We've used Mellanox pretty much exclusively for anything faster that GbE precisely because they have:
* Excellent hardware
* Good pricing
* Open drivers
* Long term support
* Backwards compatibility
* No signature checks, restrictive EULAs, telemetry, or other trojans (i.e. they are safe enough to use in secure environments and deployments planned to last for decades)
All of those things I fear are items that this activist will go after. All of them technically cut profit, at least in the short to medium term, but are also the only reason Infiniband et. al. are seeing widespread use versus other interconnect standards.
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