EMC's Tucci: Enterprise IT shifts accelerating; Ante being raised
Tech Pro Research
Storage giant EMC lowered its outlook for the 2014, but analysts say the company is likely to get a pop as it launches high-end systems in the second half. Overall, EMC is seen as a company that can navigate big IT market shifts.
EMC reported first quarter earnings of $392 million, or 19 cents a share, on revenue of $5.5 billion, up 2 percent from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were 35 cents a share and in line with expectations.
The company projected 2014 earnings between $1.90 a share to $1.95 a share compared to estimates of $1.94 a share. EMC, owner of Pivotal and VMware, said annual revenue would be $24.57 billion.
EMC's outlook was one nit in the quarter, but concerns about VMware's bookings growth was another issue. Nevertheless, analysts say EMC is well positioned going forward amid big data, cloud and flash storage system shifts.
EMC is expected to launch a series of systems at its EMC powwow in early May. Those systems should drive an upgrade cycle.
Joe Tucci, CEO of EMC, laid out the customer view:
(Customers) understand that on the back of the Internet of Things and the ability of having telemetry in almost every device they are going to be able to analyze that, collect it, analyze it, and act on it in real time. They are going to be able to change their business models, and their industries are changing.
So there is a lot more focus on the future. That is causing caution on today, because obviously if you know you have to move to the future, you might say: what is the minimum I can spend on today to get the future and to give me the maximum amount of horsepower, if you will, to spend on the move to the future?
That is all escalating. The pockets of economic uncertainty out there around the world, there is -- obviously the emerging markets are a little softer and there is a lot of factors affecting those markets. The pace of change is accelerating.
And we are mincing no words: this is a huge secular shift. One, personally, I am excited about because I believe we have great assets to capitalize on that.
See also:
- Internet of Things to drive explosion of useful data: EMC
- Recoveriescorp takes a nimble approach to storage
- VMware launching new cloud service for disaster recovery
- Oracle continues cloud push with database backup, storage cloud rollouts