Revenues From IBM System Storage Decreased 20% in 4Q08

IBM Corp. is the first storage company to report its 4Q08 financial results. Revenues from system storage decreased 20% year to year. Big Blue didn’t reveal the total amount but stated that storage represents 20% of the system and technology segment representing $5.4 billion in 4Q08, which means around $1.08 billion for storage.

"Systems and Technology declined this quarter reflecting growth in high end servers offset by a decline in our x86 and storage products,", said the company in its 4Q08 earnings presentation prepared remarks. "Disk was down 16%, and tape declined 31%.(…) Revenues from Tivoli software, infrastructure software that enables clients to centrally manage networks including security and storage capability, decreased 4%."

Comments

These bad financial results are the first sign that 4Q08 will be an ugly quarter for the worldwide storage industry, especially for the big names (excluding EMC?) and the smaller ones offering traditional storage solutions.

As we wrote formerly on this Web site, the only ones to avoid the crisis will be start-ups and small actors concentrated only on one innovative technology, offering users the possibility to get a fast ROI for a relatively small TCO. We think here mainly about de-dupe, WAFS, online backup and iSCSI. Look for example at the preliminary 4Q08 financial (excellent) results of Riverbed in today's news.