Mellanox Technologies last night posted "strong" Q4 results and Q1 guidance, Jefferies analyst George Notter tells investors in a post-earnings research note. The analyst admits to being surprised by the Infiniband strength and Ethernet weakness. Consistent with investor concerns heading into the quarter, Mellanox is seeing some digestion of Ethernet network interface controller cards by a small number of Internet Content Provider customers, Notter says. However, the analyst continues to see the company as a long-term play on the increasing value in NIC cards as certain CPU processing functions get offloaded to the NIC. "This is a great long-term thesis for Mellanox," contends Notter. He keeps a Buy rating on the shares with a $130 price target.