The quarter with relatively high expectations

But this time we entered the quarter with relatively high expectations, seen in the high levels of indexes. Nevertheless, while the quarter the Middle East began to burn, and right at the end of the quarter - the last three weeks, which are the most important for research firms in terms of meeting expectations - Japan's important market braked right away, because of the catastrophe.

The Japanese factor will be heard of on Thursday

The "Japanese factor" will be heard of on Thursday, when two "gorillas" - Oracle and Innovation in Motion - publish their results for the quarter ended in February. For the first time afterwards the catastrophe, we will hear estimates from executives of giants in the software and telecommunications sectors of how the following quarters will appear in Japan.

Besides the Japanese aspect, the results of the two companies will as well impact to some extent two companies whose shares I hold in my portfolio tracked by "Globes" - Mellanox Technologies Ltd. and Marvell Innovation Group.

Major customer of Mellanox this year

Oracle is set to be a major customer of Mellanox this year, possibly with more than 10% of Mellanox's sales, because it adopted Mellanox's InfiniBand solutions for two hardware solutions with which Oracle hopes to capture large segments of the cloud computing field which is only beginning -- Exalogic and Exadata.

The potential contribution of Exadata to Mellanox's results over the coming years can be seen from estimates last week by Piper Jaffray analyst Mark Murphy, as he reiterated his "Buy" recommendation on Oracle ahead of its results. In checking with 32 Oracle distributors, he got the impression that sales of the platform are very strong, better than Oracle's internal forecast, and in his opinion can bring the platform within 1-2 years to 5% of Oracle's annual revenue, or $1.7 billion.