IBM Storage Holds Steady

IBM Corp.'s (NYSE: IBM) financial results today showed storage hardware and software holding their own and even pulling ahead of other product lines.

Overall, IBM reported first-quarter income of $1.6 billion or $0.93 EPS, in line with analysts' expectations. That was an 18 percent increase from the same quarter last year. IBM's revenues climbed to $22.2 billion, up 11 percent from $20.1 billion a year ago.

IBMs storage revenues ran a bit ahead of overall growth. Storage hardware revenues increased 16 percent year-over-year on the strength of midrange disk and tape. While tape sales weren't detailed during today's earnings presentation, earlier this week research firm Gartner/Dataquest declared IBM the world leader in tape sales in 2003 (see Gartner: IBM Tops Tape Drive Market).

IBM CFO John Joyce said midrange disk revenues grew 35 percent over last year, and he expects to get a boost from the Baby Shark midrange storage system announced last week. “It was designed to provide a compelling replacement for competitive midrange products,” Joyce said, obviously referring to EMC’s Symmetrix DMX800 (see Son of Shark Emerges).

IBM Tivoli storage software revenues grew 18 percent from last year, with Tivoli Storage Manager growing 35 percent. According to Joyce, IBM Tivoli sales reflected an expansion of SAN technical support (see IBM Seeks Suite Spot).As EMC CEO Joe Tucci said earlier in the day, Joyce said there are solid signs of an IT spending increase. He said that was more evident in hardware and software sales rather than services.

“In the fourth quarter last year, we said we started to see pickup in the IT environment. This quarter, we affirmed that,” Joyce said in a conference call with analysts.

In general, IBM's figures place it in the middle of rivals in terms of growth. EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) quadrupled its income from a year ago to $140 million, while Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) plunged to a loss of $760 million (see EMC Earnings Up).

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch