Jacada (JCDA) signs another material deal — this time it’s a follow-on deal with Nationwide Insurance.  According to the release, “This most recent contract extends the use of the Jacada solution to the Property and Casualty Direct Sales and Service group, to further automate and simplify access to customer, policy and billing information.”

Defense contractor Elbit Systems (ESLT) signed a $20 million deal to supply its Hermes unmanned air vehicles (UAV) to an unnamed European country.  The agreement is for air vehicles and ground systems to be delivered in 2009, according to Reuters.

Motorola, a strategic partner of NICE Systems (NICE), announced the receipt of an order on behalf of Denmark’s Interior Ministry.  The order is for an integration of NICE Inform, the firm’s multi-media incident information management solution in an effort to consolidate radio-over-IP content from the Danish public safety network.

Speaking of NICE, NICE’s Actimize division also announced a deal with partner Unisys in Singapore which would have Actimize’s transaction surveillance system installed at Singapore’s largest financial institution, DBS.  Actimize’s system analyzes transactions and recognizes potentially suspicious patterns across a bank’s product channels.  DBS is the first bank in Asia to install such a system on an end-to-end, cross-border, and bank-wide basis.

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Aaron Katsman
IsraelNewsletter.com

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke’s tough talk on the US Dollar helped support the greenback against the major global currencies, but it caused a minor rally against the Israeli shekel. As a reminder, the shekel has been one of the world’s strongest currencies over the last year, and its strength, while serving as a seal of approval on the state of the Israeli economy, has crushed exporters as well as many Israeli hi-tech’s that sell globally but keep their R&D local, due to the fact that their expense line has increased from the currency differential. (Continue »)

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012.Smile (SMLC): “The firm noted that revenue decline reflects a significant year-over-year decline in revenues from hubbing services and a 14% year-over-year decline in the average shekel-dollar exchange rate.” (see article here). Earnings release here. See what IOI has written about SMLC and why some asset managers think it’s cheap.

Voltaire (VOLT): Stock up over 25% this week. Company reported earnings the market liked yesterday. Revenues are up, earnings are up, and margins up a lot. Earnings release here.

Answers.com (ANSW): Stock down big this week off of earnings expectations. They didn’t look too good. Earnings release here. Answers took a $2.0M charge on terminating the Dictionary.com acquisition. Traffic was down sequentially to Answers.com while WikiAnswers seems to be chugging along nicely.

Zoran (ZRAN): IOI Portfolio Member Zoran gets an upgrade from PiperJaffray. The banking firm “predicts Zoran’s growth will bottom out in the second quarter and then rebound as consumers transition to high-definition DVD players and sales of its chips and other products climb.” See our coverage of the firm here.

Ormat (ORA): Israeli geothermal player, Ormat, sells 3M shares this week in a block trade to Lehman Brothers.

NICE (NICE): Anti-rogue trader product unveiled by Israeli security play, NICE.  NICE’s Actimize unit is a leader in employee fraud detection and trading surveillance systems at large global firms and is rumored to have detected the massive fraud at Societe Generale.  See what we wrote about NICE recently. NICE reports on May 14th.

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IOI’s Zack Miller and Aaron Katsman were interviewed by CNBC’s Squawk Box. CNBC is here in Israel celebrating Israel’s 60th Birthday. See the video here.

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