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Big Blue defies server crash with Q1 profit

Despite some pretty steep revenue declines - particularly in server lines - that drove IBM's overall sales in the first quarter of 2009 down 11.4 per cent to $21.71bn, net income only fell by 1 per cent to $2.3bn. And thanks to some $1.8bn in share buybacks, earnings per share rose by 3.7 per cent to $1.70 a pop. Either Big Blue …

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Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse
Stop

With results like these...

I guess IBM must have recruited Andrew Fastow as CFO.

It's the only way.

al
Coat

I see the headline

and I know who the author is before the page opens.

Mine is the one without any blue stripes.

Matt Bryant
Happy

Not too shabby at all!

Can't knock a profit, especially in a downturn. IBM's consistency will make them attractive to share buyers looking to avoid roller-coaster stock. I expect the IBM server sales will pick up over the next year or two (just like hp's, Dell's and Fujitsu's) as they target all those Sun Slowaris shops which will now be looking to ditch all their SPARC gear for a platform with a future.

n
Coat

@ al

the author is Timothy Prickett Morgan

there's a clue in there somewhere...

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

x86 Server Revenues

HP is absolutely crushing IBM in blade servers. And Dell is severely impacting IBM in two-socket rack servers. Dell, usually an innovation laggard, actually was ahead of IBM and HP offering embedded VMware ESXi virtualization, and other optimizations for virtualization, on their rack-mount servers. The truth is, the larger x86 servers is all IBM has unique to offer for VMware, but that is not what customers want. The two-socket machines cost much less per socket, and except for the relatively brief period from Dunnington to Nehalem, lag the two-socket machines in processor technology. Add to that, even with the very solid Dunnington processors, the interconnect for Dunnington was sub-par, making for not very impressive system performance.

Now with Cisco getting into the x86 server market, and with Oracle giving new credibility to Sun's x86 servers, IBM has more to fear.

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

It's all about scaleup..

> The truth is, the larger x86 servers is all IBM has unique to offer for VMware

With vSphere offering support for hosts with 0.5TB of RAM and 256 procs, it's all about scale up... not scale out. You sound like your a HP rep to me :-)

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