QLGC Company Profile

Our products are sold directly to OEMs and through our authorized distributors and resellers. Our customers rely on our SAN infrastructure technology to deliver storage solutions to information technology professionals in virtually every business sector.

Our technology is found primarily in server, workstation, storage subsystem and hard disk drive solutions targeted at:

• Storage-intensive enterprise applications such as data warehousing, data mining and online transaction processing;

• Media-rich environments such as film/video, broadcast, medical imaging and computer-aided design, or CAD, and computer-aided manufacturing, or CAM;

• Server clustering, high-speed backup and data replication.

Our products are incorporated in a large number of solutions from OEM customers, including Cisco Systems, Inc., Dell Computer Corporation, EMC Corporation, Fujitsu Limited, Hitachi, Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Company, International Business Machines Corporation, Network Appliance, Inc., Quantum Corporation, Storage Technology Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Inc. and many others.

To ensure interoperability within the SAN, we work closely with independent hardware vendors and software vendors, as well as developers and integrators who create, test, and evaluate complementary storage networking products. We have key alliance relationships with Cisco Systems, Inc., Microsoft Corporation, VERITAS Software Corporation, Computer Associates International, Inc., Legato Systems, Inc. and McData Corporation.

Our ability to serve the storage industry stems from our highly leveraged product line that addresses virtually every connection point in a SAN infrastructure solution. On the server side of the SAN, we provide enclosure management products, HBA technology on the motherboard (“Fibre Down” technology), baseboard management solutions and Fibre Channel HBAs. Connecting servers to storage, we provide the network infrastructure with a full suite of Fibre Channel switches. On the storage side of the network, we provide controller chips for RAID storage systems. These include Fibre Channel host port connections and RAID controller to Fibre Channel and SCSI disk drive port connections. In addition, we are a leading, independent designer, developer and supplier of enterprise disk drive controllers.

One of our key strategies has been to provide our customers with solutions that simplify their product design requirements. Complete storage networking solutions that are pre-tested and easy to install significantly reduce the critical implementation and time-to-market effort for OEMs. Today, our SAN infrastructure components are found in solutions from most major server and storage OEMs worldwide.

We market and distribute our products through OEMs, system integrators, value-added resellers, or VARs, and our direct sales organization supported by field sales and systems engineering personnel. In addition, we utilize a network of independent manufacturers’ representatives and regional and international distributors.

In national and in certain international markets, we maintain both a direct sales force to serve our large OEM customers and multiple outside representatives that are focused on medium-sized and emerging accounts. National distributors carrying our products serve the VAR market. We maintain a focused business development and outbound marketing organization to assist, train, equip and augment the sales organizations of our major OEM customers and their respective reseller organizations and partners. Recently, in order to expand into the Asia-Pacific region, we opened a sales office in Taiwan to support both customers and partners in that region.

Due to the broad array of components required in the SAN infrastructure, we compete with several companies. In the Fibre Channel HBA market, our primary competitors are Emulex Corporation, LSI Logic Corporation and Applied Micro Circuits Corporation. In the SCSI sector of the I/ O market, we compete primarily with Adaptec, Inc. and LSI Logic Corporation. Our switch products compete primarily with Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc., McData Corporation and Emulex Corporation.

There are two markets in the Fibre Channel semiconductor controller business. The first market is associated with server and storage controller interfaces. In this market our primary competitors are Agilent Technologies, Inc. and LSI Logic Corporation. The second market relates to controllers for enterprise disk drives where our primary competitor is LSI Logic Corporation.

Finally, our enclosure and baseboard management semiconductor controllers compete primarily with Vitesse Semiconductor Corporation and Hitachi, Ltd.