[June 10, 2013] Globes, Tel Aviv, Israel, Shlomi Cohen column Tweet Jun 10, 2013 (Globes - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- The Mellanox Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq:MLNX; TASE:MLNX) shareholders' meeting that would not allow Eyal Waldman to continue as chairman captured the headlines last week, but in the stock itself there was little significant movement. The company among the Israeli stocks that I hold here that did make big waves on Wall Street was SodaStream International Ltd. (Nasdaq: SODA). Its share price shot up by 14 percent last week, on a huge volume, of 13 million shares, 60 percent of the company, which turned into a short-player's nightmare. "Set the bubbles free" says SodaStream's successful slogan, and they certainly broke free and went wild last week. The first to release the bubbles was Barclays analyst David Kaplan, who decided last Monday to boost his target price from $55 to a nice round $100. I don't recall such a dramatic one-day rise in a target price for a stock 80 percent -- that did not come after the release of financials or some important announcement. The second liberator of the bubbles came on Thursday, when a rumor was reported in Israel about Goldman Sachs holding talks on a sale of SodaStream to PepsiCo (PEP) at close to $100 per share. Even before trading opened on Wall Street, PepsiCo chairperson and CEO Indra Nooyi rushed to put the bubbles back in the bottle, when she strayed from the customary "no comment" beloved of CEOs asked about mergers and acquisitions, and issued a categorical denial. So what is really going on at SodaStream? In my view, a war of investment bankers behind the scene led to a few bubbles being released before time. Barclays' $100 seems timed suspiciously closely to the price at which Goldman Sachs is rumored to be trying to sell SodaStream to PepsiCo. Someone in the vicinity of some frustrated bankers probably wanted to torpedo a potential deal via a leak, even before Goldman Sachs made a proposal to the PepsiCo CEO, who told CNBC that she had heard of the deal for the first time that morning. On the subject of bubbles, it's not long since there were experts here and there who treated cloud computing as another bubble blown into the air by technology visionaries that would come to nothing in the end. They put forward weighty arguments, such as the huge investment that would be required in infrastructures for storage centers, enterprises giving up internal infrastructures in which they had invested a great deal of money over decades, and, chiefly, the need for good security solutions, without which there was no chance that enterprises would transfer sensitive IT infrastructures to the cloud. It looks as though the two huge acquisitions in this field announced last week by IBM and Salesforce.com (CRM) have put an end to the argument, and cloud computing is going to shake up the IT industry no less than the smartphone shook up telecommunications. Not many people know that, if the person who shook up telecommunications was Steve Jobs, then his counterpart, who is teaching the IT industry a lesson as he puts billions of dollars into cloud computing services, is Jeff Bezos, founder, president, CEO and chairman of Amazon (AMZN). For example, IBM is currently trying to torpedo a contract for construction of cloud computing infrastructure to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars recently won by Amazon, and apparently lost by IBM, for none other than the CIA, which has the highest possible security requirements. The cloud computing leadership race is doing nothing but good to several Israeli companies in one infrastructure niche or another. In security, we have Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: CHKP) and Radware Ltd. (Nasdaq: RDWR). The latter also specializes in load balancing for cloud computing providers. Mellanox leads in high-speed connectivity and low latency, and it will present at the huge Cloud Expo in New York. Amazon's cloud computing website (AWS) offers its customers Attunity Inc. (Bulletin Board: ATTUF) tools for efficient transfer of files from the enterprise to the cloud. Last week, when Salesforce.com announced a $2.5 billion acquisition of an online marketing company, ClickSoftware Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: CKSW) VP global marketing Efrat Ravid wrote on the company's blog about their collaboration with Salesforce. The cloud-based customer relations management solutions giant will soon offer its customers ClickSoftware's workforce mobility solutions for the cloud, through integration of the ClickWorkforce application. Two years ago, ClickSoftware, which specializes in optimization of service personnel management in large enterprises, set up a separate division for cloud-based solutions for small and medium-size enterprises that do not wish to invest in computer infrastructures, but prefer to pay for services via the cloud according to usage. ClickSoftware provides this service to its customers via Amazon's cloud unit. ___ (c)2013 the Globes (Tel Aviv, Israel) Visit the Globes (Tel Aviv, Israel) at www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/nodeview.asp?fid=942 Distributed by MCT Information Services [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]