SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 9 -- BLADE Network Technologies, Inc. (BLADE), the trusted leader in datacenter networking, announced that BLADE achieved its historically best quarterly revenues, profits and market share following the close of its third fiscal 2009 quarter on July 31, since its founding as an independent company in February 2006.

In addition to outstanding financial results, BLADE reached these milestones:

• BLADE completed its Series B financing, with new investors NEC (TSE: 6701), Juniper Networks and a third technology industry leader as a silent investor joining founding investor, Garnett & Helfrich Capital, which reinvested in the company. This funding round values the company at $230 million.
   
• BLADE installed its six-millionth Ethernet switch port at Baidu.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU), the leading Chinese language Internet search provider for China.

Thus, despite the current challenging economy, BLADE is on track to deliver another year of strong growth. BLADE leads Cisco in market share of Ethernet switches for blade servers through its trusted partnerships with HP, IBM, NEC and Verari Systems and, according to Dell'Oro Group's Q209 Ethernet Switch Quarterly Report, is one of the world's top three suppliers of 10 Gigabit Ethernet datacenter switches.

Six-Millionth Ethernet Switch Port Milestone

An indicator of BLADE's market leadership and growth is the installation of its six-millionth Ethernet switch port at Baidu.com, the number one Chinese language search provider and most trafficked web site in China. In addition to its search portal, Baidu.com provides a wide range of web services, such as Baidu: Map, News, MP3 Search, Image Search, Video Search, Movies, Love, Games, and the largest Chinese-language encyclopedia -- Baidu Encyclopedia, among other services. Baidu has deployed BLADE's RackSwitch in its massive datacenters in order to ensure high availability of data without delay.

Q32009 Financial Performance

BLADE's financial performance illustrates the strength of BLADE's customer relationships and market share in cloud-ready networking solutions. BLADE's customers comprise more than 300 of the Fortune 500, with innovative Ethernet datacenter networking solutions that offer the industry's best price/performance, lowest power consumption and lowest latency for today's dynamic, virtualized computing environments. As enterprises seek to meet increasing demand for cloud computing, Web 2.0, video on demand, digital media, financial services and other high performance applications, BLADE provides the essential high-speed networking and fast data delivery necessary to run world-class companies.

"Our record-breaking third quarter is a testament to our business model, focus on innovation and passionate commitment to customer satisfaction," said Vikram Mehta, president and CEO, BLADE Network Technologies. "This achievement is particularly gratifying at a time of general economic downturn. As the world's largest enterprises undertake multi-billion-dollar upgrades of their datacenters, BLADE will continue to join forces with IT leaders such as HP, IBM and NEC to meet the needs of this datacenter revolution for ultra-fast infrastructures while providing freedom from the domination of a single vendor."

General Industry Comments

"IBM has been working closely with BLADE Network Technologies since the company's inception, and would like to congratulate BLADE on its impressive achievements," said Alex Yost, vice president, IBM Systems & Technology Group. "We look forward to on-going close collaboration as we continue to provide industry-leading innovations for dynamic datacenter infrastructures that are delivering high performance and cloud computing for the largest enterprises in the world."

"We are delighted to be working with BLADE Network Technologies in the development of our Infinity Archive appliance, launched at NAB earlier this year and also showing at IBC in Amsterdam in September," said Keith Warburton, Managing Director, Global Distribution, a specialist solutions provider for the storage-intensive and archive applications required in such markets as broadcast, digital video, HPC and CCTV. "The broadcast industry is going digital and management of digital assets including archive is very important so we are offering ultra-fast, very low-latency Ethernet switching using switches that BLADE Network Technologies provides. This enables digital assets to be exchanged between systems with as little latency as possible in order to aid collaborative workflow."

"Fulcrum is pleased to be the technology partner working with BLADE Network Technologies to develop high-performance 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches that empower the next generation of datacenters," said Bob Nunn, CEO of Fulcrum Microsystems, Inc. "Combining our FocalPoint switch chip family with BLADE's advanced datacenter software, BLADE's products offer dramatic improvements in performance, power and cost versus traditional networking solutions."

About BLADE Network Technologies

BLADE Network Technologies (BLADE) is the leading provider of Gigabit and 10G Ethernet cloud-ready networking solutions for dynamic, enterprise datacenters worldwide. In addition to its innovative OEM blade switches, and SmartConnect with VMready virtualization and BLADEHarmony Manager software, BLADE's "Virtual, Cooler, Easier" RackSwitch family enables "Rackonomics" -- an efficient approach for scaling out datacenter networks to drive down total cost of ownership. Visit www.bladenetwork.net.

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Source: BLADE Network Technologies, Inc.