3Ware 2010 Annual Report Download

215 Moffett Park Drive, Sunnyvale, CA 94089 phone [phone] fax [phone] apm.com
To AppliedMicro Stockholders,
By almost any measure, fiscal year 2010 (ending March 31, 2010) presented the most challenging macroeconomic
environment in the company’s operating history. Economic uncertainty was a common theme among technology
companies serving the Telecommunications, Data Center Networking and even the Consumer and Small-to-Medium
Business (C-SMB) segments. AppliedMicro responded to this challenge by streamlining the company’s operations for
increased efficiency, and reducing operating expenses. At the same time the company took aggressive steps to position
itself for growth once the economic conditions returned to normal patterns.
AppliedMicro increased its focus on the development of products and in particular centered its attention on power-efficient
and cost-effective designs, combined with a bold move to 40 nanometer technologies, to create compelling solutions for
our customers. We are positioned to release 4-6 new products in fiscal year 2011, which is more than we have done in any
of the previous three years.
With the divestiture of our 3ware storage product division, we have streamlined our focus on three key areas:
Optical Transport Network (OTN) - Demand for video services in the home as well as in mobile devices
1)
continues to fuel the need for ever-increasing bandwidth. OTN is an economical approach to providing
Ethernet based services beyond the enterprise/datacenter environment, and extend it into the
edge/access and metro/ core, all while maintaining the deterministic service levels associated with older
Synchronous Optical Networking (SONET)/ Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) solutions. Another
trend that helps to support large bandwidth increases has been the shift in service provider networks to
10/40/100G speeds. We expect to strengthen and expand our market leading position in 10/40/100G
OTN with our physical layer and framer/mapper devices.
10 Gigabit Ethernet (
2) 10G) Datacom – Migration has begun to 10G ports to support large densities of
traffic moving through Internet data centers. The need to reduce the power footprint is another
important driver. 10G also provides for a unified networking fabric over Ethernet, and eliminates the
need to maintain separate networks for networking and storage. We expect to build on our strong 10G
datacom connectivity presence as we go forward.
Low Power Embedded Processing – Our customer applications continue to require high-performance
3)
multi-core solutions that are cost-optimized and power efficient. We are seeing demand for server-class
features in consumer-grade applications. Our traction remains strong in the enterprise and telco
segments, and we are beginning to see expansion of our footprint into consumer platforms. With our
Power Architecture based solutions, we plan to establish AppliedMicro as a much larger player in the
embedded processor segment.
AppliedMicro has secured a number of design wins with several leading Tier-1 OEMs and many other leading suppliers of
Telco and Data Center Networking solutions. Furthermore, as video and mobile traffic continue to expand Internet traffic
at rates exceeding 100 percent per year, we believe the need for AppliedMicro solutions will grow in four technical areas:
10/40/100G Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and mixed-signal solutions – that span optical and copper
1)
World class Forward Error Correction (FEC) technology and framer/mapper solutions 2)
High-performance, low-power embedded processors 3)
System software for networking and data center computing 4)