By Robert Daniel, MarketWatch

TEL AVIV (MarketWatch) — Barclays Capital’s book-length Global Technology Outlook devotes a few pages to Israeli innovators, and the firm particularly likes four companies tied to trends like big-data storage and cloud computing, or delivering software and services over the Net.

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“Israeli technology stocks appear well positioned for 2012,” Barclays Capital analysts Joseph Wolf and David Kaplan wrote in the Thursday report. “Storage, cloud computing, mobile handsets and security remain high priorities for information-technology managers globally and should continue to be areas of investment. …

“Our top picks,” Mellanox Technologies Ltd. and Nice Systems Ltd., “are not showing any signs of economic-related slowdown, and we expect second-half strength for” EZchip Technologies Ltd. and Ceva Inc. “as new servers and handsets enter the market.”

Mellanox MLNX -1.20%   IL:MLNX -1.85%  is the provider of technology to facilitate fast and efficient transfer of data between servers and storage systems. Nice’s NICE -0.74%  IL:NICE -0.14%  systems focus on recording, archiving and analyzing data for industrial and security applications.

Where’s the growth from these two companies? More unstructured data — information like videos, text messages, graphic presentations and other material that’s not organized in a database — are “being created as a result of digital content moving online,” Barclays said.

This plus more complex computing applications and delivery of software as a service over the Internet have “fueled the need for more powerful, higher capacity, and faster technology solutions capable of managing and analyzing this data.”

And companies “are finding it critical to manage and implement the massive amounts of data they have accumulated. Companies that provide the solutions to manage, utilize and analyze should be well positioned for growth in 2012,” the analysts wrote.

Mellanox, Barclays’s top pick in Israel, is seeing a “breakout year” as “its mix of business moves from the niche high-performance computing segment and into more mainstream data-center applications,” the analysts said.

In mid-April Mellanox reported strong first-quarter earnings and investors pushed the stock past newly revised price targets to a 52-week high $67. Since then the stock has come off 20%, trading below $54 on Friday. MarketWatch feature on Mellanox

Nice “is a leader in analyzing structured and unstructured data,” Wolf and Kaplan said.

It “made four acquisitions in 2011, which together are likely to add upwards of 10 cents to earnings per share,” they wrote.

The acquisitions and the company’s share buyback are “good uses of its significant cash balance. At the same time it continues to work toward a midterm 20% operating-margin target, and … there may be some upside to that target.”

Nice has had a bumpy 52 weeks, touching a trading low near $27 in August, toughing it up past $40 at the end of March and coming off 10% since then.

EZChip produces processors for telecom-networking equipment.

“EZchip EZCH -4.40%   IL:EZCH -1.94%  is exposed to the economically sensitive” market for equipment for telecom carriers, Kaplan and Wolf said.

But EZchip also sells into the market for carrier Ethernet switches and routers, which help enable delivery of heavy-bandwidth applications like video and television over the Internet. CERS “remains an area of spending growth,” the Barclays analysts wrote.

The company’s shares are up about 35% in 2012 to date. MarketWatch feature on EZchip.

Ceva CEVA -2.58%  licenses digital-signal-processing technology to makers of chips that are used in mobile phones. DSP converts analog data to digital so, for example, a voice or photo from a mobile phone can be heard or seen clearly on the other end.

“Ceva has a strong relationship with Samsung,SSNLF -4.13%   [has] a solid base in the AndroidGOOG -3.64%  segment globally and already has key design wins” in 4G networks, they said.

Getting its technology into lower-end phones, Ceva “has 55%-to-60% market share in the 1.1-billion-unit emerging-market segment,” the analysts said.

Ceva is trading at a bit more than half its closing price at the end of 2011. “Given the weak stock performance year to date, we expect that Ceva may have taken the opportunity to buy back shares, something it has not done since 2010,” they said.