Solarflare Communications Inc. will relocate its headquarters to a larger site in Irvine amid plans for continued new hiring.
Solarflare will move from its office near John Wayne Airport to a 22,000-square-foot building near the former El Toro Marine base, an area that’s home to several technology upstarts and specialized manufacturers. The company will occupy the first floor of a two-story building at Irvine Business Center, with signage rights and a 60-month lease.
Solarflare makes networking equipment such as adapters, controllers and circuit boards, which speed up data transfer and improve performance in servers, data centers and the cloud. Its new headquarters is undergoing fit-out construction and will feature large engineering labs, server rooms, administrative offices and tight security.
“We’ve got a fairly specific need that we require,” said Scott Woolsey, director of brand development. “We definitely have room to grow within that space.”
Surging demand and new market opportunities prompted the relocation and work force expansion, Woolsey said.
New Hires
The company has added almost 50 employees in the last 15 months and plans to hire more than 20 additional workers in Irvine and an office in Cambridge, U.K., this year.
Solarflare currently employs 107 workers. Roughly half are located in Irvine, where it designs chips.
In the U.K., it develops software and firmware, or software installed on memory chips in hardware devices.
Revenue is projected to double this year, as Solarflare picks up business in the financial services sector and extends its products into new markets.
Chief Executive Russell Stern wouldn’t disclose revenue details but said yearly sales are in the “tens of millions.”
Niche
Solarflare has carved out a niche in the last few years selling data-networking circuit boards to banks, hedge fund managers, stock exchanges, brokerages and other financial institutions.
The company has deals with the New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq Stock Market and Chicago Board Options Exchange to embed technology designed to boost high-frequency trading. It counts more than 440 customers in financial services, including nearly every major bank with operations in the U.S.
The shift to directly sell to end-users deviated from the company’s initial strategy to sell chips to server manufacturers. Solarflare sold its connectivity chip business in May to an undisclosed company; ahead of the sale it reportedly was in talks with Santa Clara-based Marvell Technology Group Ltd., which makes chips for data storage and networking.
Since the divestiture, the company has focused attention on the emerging 10-gigabit ethernet segment, which eventually is expected to supplant 1-Gigabit connections in data center racks and towers.
The company is expected to soon announce a major new customer in the oil and gas industry that will use its technology to handle petabytes of exploration data. A petabyte is 1,000 times larger than a terabyte; an external hard drive often has 1 terabyte of storage.
Solarflare’s embedded technology will be used to process and compress huge amounts of information in the company’s data centers in an hour or less, compared to days otherwise.
“We’re getting requests from people who we never thought to talk to,” Woolsey said.
The company also is in negotiations with government agencies involved in security issues.
Expected Wins
It soon expects to land design wins with Round Rock, Texas-based Dell Inc., IBM Corp. in New York and Palo Alto-based Hewlett-Packard Co. that will offer Solarflare’s adapter cards as an option on computer and server purchases.
“That’s an ongoing change in the way we go to market,” Woolsey said.
Solarflare has raised more than $200 million in venture funding since its inception in 2004.
Investors include Westport, Conn.-based Oak Investment Partners, Britain’s Acacia Capital Partners, Santa Monica-based Anthem Venture Partners, Corona del Mar’s Miramar Venture Partners and Intel Corp.’s venture arm, among others.
