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Source: Globes, Tel Aviv, IsraelJuly 29--The third week of the second quarter results was full of surprises.自存倉 The biggest of them was sprung by Facebook (FB), which revealed to investors how well it was doing in mobile, and shot up. As I said last week, it was easy for Apple (AAPL) to surprise favorably, because of very low expectations, and the enigma that is Amazon (AMZN) continued to defy prediction.Amazon slid into loss, and the share price rose. Investors in effect told smiling but stubborn Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos that he should take plenty of rope and go wild with investment at the expense of the bottom line, because he has already proved himself a man of vision who is not always understood. They never believed that this bookseller would defeat the great IBM in a tender worth hundreds of millions of dollars for setting up cloud computing for the CIA.Among the Israeli companies that reported was Mellanox Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq:MLNX; TASE:MLNX). Founder and CEO Eyal Waldman took leave of the local stock market with a last conference call in Hebrew, and like any good Golani Brigade man who goes off in anger, he left scorched earth behind at the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. When you see what is happening there at the moment, it makes you wonder whether it really was such a vital matter of principle for the institutions to vote against Waldman as chairman, and thus show him the door.As for the second quarter results themselves, they were better than expected. The guidance was below expectations, because the huge contracts that the company has apparently won will contribute only from the end of the year, going into 2014. In the days leading up to the results, there were constant rumors that Intel (INTC) was winning contracts at Mellanox's expense, and that it had launched a processor that would hit Mellanox. These rumors put pressure on the share, but Waldman vigorously denied both of them in the conference call.In the past two years, Intel has become the doomsday weapon that the short players have deployed against Mellanox whenever they see the share price start to take off thanks to rumors of contracts that the company has won. It reminds me of the first years of Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: CHKP) as a profitable public company, when it kept being threatened that, any minute, Microsoft (MSFT) would kill it off with amazing security solutions.It has to be understood that these gorillas find it very hard to contend in special niches with outstanding small companies, which are a kind of elite force focusing on specific areas. In case anyone has forgotten, Intel was supposed to have finished off pipsqueak EZchip S迷你倉新蒲崗miconductor Ltd. (Nasdaq: EZCH; TASE:EZCH) years ago, but in the end surrendered to founder and CEO Eli Fruchter's compact and wonderful outfit, and abandoned high-performance network processors.The threat to the Israeli elite forces doesn't always come from the gorillas. I recently got to know a small privately-held company from Cleveland in the US that is making life difficult for ClickSoftware Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: CKSW) in the small niche in which ClickSoftware is the undoubted leader: management and optimization solutions for field service personnel in such industries as cable television, telephony, power supply, water and gas.The company in question is TOA Technologies, which is on track for a Nasdaq IPO, after recently raising $66 million, making it $100 million raised since it was founded. One of the suprising things about this company is that it is run by two Israelis, who founded it a decade ago. Yuval Brisker, an architect, and Irad Carmi, a musician, decided that the frustration experienced worldwide waiting for ever for a service technician to turn up could be solved by smart ordering software.Thus TOA was founded, and the two Cleveland-based Israelis have found themselves competing head-to-head with ClickSoftware of Petah Tikva, run by Dr. Moshe BenBassat. Gartner rates them both market leaders, and TOA, which does not disclose financial details, is apparently much smaller than ClickSoftware, but growing fast. The annual value of contracts it won grew by 444 percent between 2008 and 2012.ClickSoftware warned about June quarter profits, and also said that the switch to software as a service (SaaS), or cloud-based, sales, would adversely affect its profits in the short and medium term. The warning can to some extent be linked to TOA, because, in April, it won a large contract at ClickSoftware's expense with a giant telephony company that operates in 24 countries and has tens of thousands of service technicians.Brisker and Carmi founded TOA a decade ago as an SaaS company from the start, even before they knew that this would be called "cloud computing". In the near future, when TOA too is a public company and its numbers are disclosed, we will be able to express an opinion on which of these two Israeli-led companies on the two sides of the ocean is the derby winner. Or perhaps a merger between the two will create one big company in an area whose potential is being boosted strongly by the mobile revolution, which is only just beginning.Copyright: ___ (c)2013 the Globes (Tel Aviv, Israel) Visit the Globes (Tel Aviv, Israel) at .globes.co.il/serveen/globes/nodeview.asp?fid=942 Distributed by MCT Information Services迷你倉出租