EMC, VMWare Steady

EMC (NYSE:EMC) and VMWare (NYSE:VMW) recently announced their quarterly results. While they failed to meet some expectations, both companies’ managements were reasonably happy with their performances in this poor economy.

Networking Sector: Changing Landscape

Early in the month, Cisco said that the networking industry is showing signs of stabilizing despite an 18% slump in sales. 3Com too has been showing signs of pulling off a turnaround. Nortel, however, filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. And Brocade is likely an acquisition target. Let’s now analyze the performance of the remaining

Read Full Article »

Acquisition Prospects in SaaS

The global recession, which not surprisingly has forced companies to cut operating costs and streamline IT operations, has been something of a boon for the SaaS sector, with major companies turning to cloud computing. I expect to see acquisitions in the SaaS space this year. SaaS companies like NetSuite, SuccessFactors, and Citrix, which all recently

Read Full Article »

Deal Radar 2009: Sonoa Systems

Last year, I wrote a piece called SaaS Impact on IT Infrastructure as part of the Trend Radar 2008 series. In the last 16 months, SaaS has really taken off, with over 500 companies in the space. Concurrently, the operational complexity of managing SaaS in the enterprise has also escalated. Today’s Deal Radar looks at

Read Full Article »

Will IBM Shift Application Software Strategy?

Yesterday, IBM reported a strong first quarter that beat earnings estimates. Q1 revenues were down 11% to $21.7 billion, short of Street estimates of $22.5 billion. Net income was down 1% to $2.3 billion. However, EPS was up 4% to $1.73 per share, beating Street estimates of $1.69 per share. Let’s take a closer look.

Salesforce.com Needs Focus On Margins, Acquisitions

As we saw in our other posts on SaaS companies, the SaaS sector is still doing pretty well. Let’s now examine the results of the leading company in the sector, Salesforce.com. On February 26, Salesforce.com (CRM) reported its fourth quarter and fiscal year 2009 results. Despite the recession, Salesforce.com beat estimates and managed to achieve

Read Full Article »

VMWare Outperforms, Cisco Watching?

VMware (NYSE:VMW) kept up with its previous quarter’s performance of exceeding the market’s expectations in the recently announced Q4 results. Revenues for the quarter of $515 million exceeded the market’s expectations of $512 million and reported 25% annual growth. EPS for the quarter of $0.36 was significantly higher than the market’s expectations of $0.26 and

Read Full Article »

Microsoft Also Needs Cleaning Up

Microsoft’s (MSFT) woes continued this quarter as was evident from their Q2 results announced yesterday. Q2 revenue of $16.6 billion recorded annual growth of only 1% and sequential growth of 10%. The market was looking for revenue of $17.1 billion. EPS of $0.47 was also 2 cents shy of the market’s expectations. EPS dropped one

Read Full Article »