News

posted on 24 April 2008 07:57

EMC saw a 50 percent plus growth rate in Celerra NAS revenue in its Q1 fiscal 08 quarter and a 71 percent increase in VMware revenues compared to the year-ago quarter. This is its 19th quarter of successive double digit growth, at 17 percent.

EMC earned $3.47 billion in the quarter, compared to the year-ago quarter's $2.98 billion. The company's net income of $268 million was reduced by a $79.2 million charge related to recent acquisitions and associated development costs.

The quarterly results statement showed:-

- Symmetrix revenues increased 8 percent
- CLARiiON revenues went up 19 percent
- Content management and archiving (Documentum, etc) went up 8 percent
- RSA security earnings rose 13 percent.

The growth engines are VMware and network-attached storage (NAS). The mid-range modular CLARiiON products did well but people may feel that content management and archiving could do better. An 8 percent increase against a background of trumpeted unstoppable and rampant unstructured file storage growth in our digital universe is nothing to write home about.

RSA revenue growth looks steady while Symmetrix looks mature.

We expect the company to announce its new grid-like or clustered Hulk/Maui hardware/software combo this quarter, for the web 2.0/cloud computing market and it has also just set up a consumer/SOHO division under the rule of Jonathan Huberman, ex-CEO of the acquired Iomega.

Unless EMC can find a way to make the great mass of mid-market customers look more favourably at its content management and archiving products then it is these two areas the company will look to, to enable it to continue its hugely impressive successsion of double-digit growth quarters.

One background to these results is the worsening economic climate with a credit squeeze and with the US entering/about to enter/already in a recession. EMC's results don't show evidence of a spending slowdown by its customers, which is good news.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}