IBM: Fiscal 3Q09 Financial Results

For its fiscal 3Q09 quarter ending in September 30, IBM Corp. revealed few information about its storage activities. Here is what we got.

Revenues from system storage decreased 13% from 3Q08 to 3Q09, to be compared to 20% from 2Q08 to 2Q09. But no figures were published.

IBM said it gained market share in System p, System x and disk and tape storage during the the quarter.

Here is an abstract of the earnings call transcript:
"In disk, we again gained share. Our storage acquisitions, XIV and Diligent, had strong performance. XIV added more than 65 new customers during the quarter, and over 275 customers since we purchased the company. We gained share in tape as well, as we continue to displace competitors."

Comments

These financial results and better guidance from several storage companies confirm that calendar 3Q09 will be a better period than 2Q09 for the global storage industry.

A lot of end users decreased their purchase from 4Q08 to 2Q09 because of the crisis, but, seeing their storage capacities continuing to increase, they are coming back to their vendors, being attracted by new technologies (de-dupe, thin provisioning, lower-priced HDDs, etc.).

The last quarter of 2009 will be probably once more better than the preceding one. But, we thing that, at the end of current year, total revenues of the worldwide storage industry will decrease compared to 2008, as the first six-month period of the year was really bad.

We are waiting for the financial results of storage giant EMC and Seagate, to be publish in the next few days, to confirm this analysis.