The effort marks the Internet company’s first full-fledged effort to design and market consumer electronics devices under the Google brand, and represents a sharp shift in strategy. Google has up to now mainly focused on developing the Android software that powers devices such as smartphones and tablets and allowing other companies to build and brand the hardware that uses it.

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Shares are down more than $4, or about 13 percent. The freakout appears to be coming from gross margins that shrank to 51 percent from almost 59 percent in the prior quarter, and despite the fact that sales more than doubled sequentially to $84 million from $31 million before.

CEO David Flynn called me up a little while ago to talk about the results, and he reminded me that Fusion launched its new IO Drive 2. It’s a transition to a new product line that’s proving tricky. New products built on new technologies are always a little more costly to build up front, and that’s compounded by the fact that early adopters, when they buy the new stuff, take the lower-end version and not the more expensive and more profitable one.

Also, enterprise customers who buy the new stuff are always conservative and take longer to decide whether they want to buy it or not, he says. Even so, the company has sold 10,000 of the new drives.

But? There’s a new customer of record: Salesforce.com is now a Fusion-io customer, and has joined the likes of Apple and Facebook, which is using the flash-based chips in the servers running in its data centers around the world.

And Salesforce isn’t buying it directly from Fusion, but rather through one its OEM partners, which include Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell, though Flynn wouldn’t tell me which one it is.

Salesforce is one of six customers who bought more than a million dollars worth of Fusion’s stuff this quarter and of those, four were repeat customers, Flynn told me.

The Salesforce win is also important, Flynn says, because some have wondered whether Fusion’s technology, while popular with high-end enterprises like banks and Facebook, would make sense for applications that tend to be used in mid-tier businesses, which Salesforce’s mainline CRM application often is. The lower end of the enterprise software market is moving toward cloud-based software, which is often referred to as Software as a Service, or SAAS. “By helping those companies, we are indirectly driving business in the mid-range of the market. Apple and Facebook are in the SAAS business too, it’s just that their customers are consumers.”

One interesting fact that Flynn shared with me: His first job out of college was working for Oracle. His boss at the time? One-time Oracle exec and now Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. A small world it is, indeed.

The spot depicts a batch of assembly-line robots busily building cars, as an instrumental version of the 1979 Gary Numan hit “Cars” plays happily. All is well until one of the robots experiences trouble and complains to the others, “I’m broken.” No problem, one of the others says, fixes his stricken comrade, and all is again well. Cue the voice-over, saying something about assembly lines that repair themselves. Then cue the corporate logo, aaaand … out.

The spot — which has exactly 100 percent less Ellen Page than the last series of Cisco TV ads — is part of a significant new advertising offensive that Cisco is launching today on television, in print and online. The TV spots will appear during the NCAA basketball games, the National Hockey League’s All-Star Skills Competition, and on CNBC and other business-oriented programming. However, it notably won’t appear during the Super Bowl.

Those robots will be seen again, disassembling and reassembling sections of certain Web sites as part of a series of “site takeovers,” including CNBC and The Street, among others.

The print portion is a six-page “manifesto” that explains ways that Cisco’s “Human Network” plays important and unexpected roles at banking companies and companies that sell chutney, and helps the National Basketball Association push its video around the world. The manifesto will appear in The Wall Street Journal (which, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp.), the Economist and the New York Times.

There will also be a social campaign via LinkedIn that goes after 140,000 C-level executives registered on that network. It will be the first time that embedded video will be used in a LinkedIn campaign. More TV ads will come later this year, as will localized versions of the campaign for international markets.

Last week, I talked with Blair Christie, Cisco’s chief marketing officer, who said that the manifesto in particular is about using the voice of its customers to show how Cisco’s technology can help companies do things they couldn’t do before. Of course, the point they’re supposed to get is that a Cisco intelligent network is what’s enabling them to do that.

Christie says it’s all part of Cisco’s effort to simplify how it communicates about itself. There’s no more muddling of the message. There’s no more consumer division to eat into the perception that Cisco is anything but an enterprise- and service-provider-focused networking company, so no more need for cute ads that overdo awkward jokes about teleconferencing, or showing a giggly twentysomething woman in a virtual fitting room. Cisco is now about transforming how companies do what they do, either by doing it better, or seeing new opportunities. It’s a big message, and a tricky one to get across in 30 seconds during a football game.

I asked Christie about the state of Cisco’s brand before this campaign, and whether or not there were any perceived weaknesses, given its recent troubles, that this ad effort is meant to shore up. “There was actually a lot that was right with our brand,” she told me. “The opportunity we had was clear and simple. Our customer voice is our talent, and that’s what we’re showing, and it’s consistent with our strategy. We use our customers as a test bed, so why not use them as a reflection of our brand? It wasn’t rocket science. But it was the customer voice that was missing.”

Simplifying and streamlining are themes that Cisco is certainly acquainted with of late. It has been doing a lot of those, and indeed, even shrinking itself as part of a broad-based restructuring. The results of that effort are starting to show up in Cisco’s results.

Time will tell if this new advertising campaign will help Cisco effectively reintroduce itself to its core customers; fight off strong competitive thrusts from the likes of Hewlett-Packard, whose networking division marketed itself aggressively against Cisco in 2010; and perhaps press a perceived advantage against Juniper Networks, which has been having its own problems.

What I find notable, or maybe missing from the campaign, are recognizable names of customers doing innovative things. Yes, there’s the NBA, but in the print manifesto, who’s the bank that’s using Cisco’s video TelePresence to interact with customers? Who’s the small chutney company that turned “browsers into buyers”? And who’s the car company with such smart assembly-line robots? It’s a good message that, to my mind, could be made a lot more effective with more specific examples.

And while I grant it’s often difficult to get customers to agree to be named in ads like this — you could almost hear CEO John Chambers’s frustration about not being allowed to name a certain banking customer, about which he was obviously proud, on a recent conference call — the biggest networking company in the world shouldn’t have such a problem. It should be able to brag that this or that household-name bank is an enthusiastic Cisco customer, and that Cisco networks powered the manufacturing of that popular car everyone is talking about right now. That would add some real oomph, and really serve to remind potential customers that Cisco is still, despite its recent missteps, the networking world’s alpha dog.

Anyhow, my critique aside, here’s the robots spot. Enjoy:

Cisco Robots from Arik Hesseldahl on Vimeo.

In 2011, it crossed the threshold of $50 billion in annual sales for the first time, having hit the $40 billion mark only last year. This came after a tough year — 2009 — during which sales declined a bit to $35 billion, down from $37 billion in 2008. But the larger point is clear: Intel continues to be a significant growth machine in a tech ecosystem that is supposed to be on the decline.

Who says so? “The experts.” Earlier this month, Gartner and IDC both reported what they described as the second-worst year for PC sales growth in recorded history, second only to the doldrums of 2001, when the world was beset by the dotcom crash, the onset of the global war on terror and general recession, all in one. This came after the same two outfits made similarly depressing predictions for worldwide IT spending.

Intel’s results tell a different story. Consider its strengths: Sales in its data-center group — chips being sold to companies building servers that will be used to power data and applications running on the Internet — grew 17 percent year on year to north of $10 billion. And the lowly PC? The machine that is said to be on the decline by so many people who claim to know what’s going on? Sales in Intel’s PC client group grew by more than $5 billion year on year to north of $35 billion.

How can that be possible? It’s an argument that Intel has been making for some time now, and is now becoming familiar: Persistent strength in emerging markets. As Intel CEO Paul Otellini said on a conference call with analysts today, emerging markets, where household incomes are improving to the point that consumers are able to buy their first PCs, are accounting for two out of every three units of incremental microprocessor demand. Which means that for every three chips of new growth sold in a year, two are sold in an emerging market.

PC sales in China, by Intel’s reckoning, grew 15 percent, and as yet have only achieved a household penetration rate of 35 percent, which says there’s lots of room still to grow. By comparison, the U.S. market is 90 percent penetrated, meaning nearly everyone who wants a PC has one. India grew 22 percent; Indonesia, 37 percent.

Here’s another really interesting metric that should give you some food for thought: In 2012, Intel will spend $12.5 billion on capital expenditures. That’s more than twice what it spent last year. What is it spending so lavishly on? Four new chip factories — in Oregon, Arizona, China and Israel — which, when completed, will turn out chips built on the very latest, edge-of-reality technology, where chips have transistors and other elements on them that are at the 14-nanometer scale.

How small is 14 nanometers? About one-fifth the size of a typical virus cell, and only slightly bigger than the thickness of the cell wall of a typical germ. Next year, there will be four factories, employing thousands of people, turning out thousands — and later millions — of these miniscule fragments of silicon that arguably constitute some of the most complex implements mankind has ever built.

And Intel does this profitably, which is so difficult and requires such financial scale that most companies that make other kinds of chips long ago gave up running their own factories and farmed the work of actually building them to other companies. Intel is so good at it that its gross margins in 2011 were 62.5 percent. Its full profit for the year was nearly $13 billion on $54 billion in sales.

Yes, we beat on Intel for not having conquered the smartphone industry or the tablet industry as readily as it spent the 1990s bending the PC industry to its will. There is a school of thought that says Intel is less relevant today than it was, say, five years ago, and that its anemic presence in the future of personal computing — smartphones and tablets — is all the evidence one needs to render that judgement. In fairness, smartphones and tablets are still on the rise, and Intel is starting to show some promising progress, though its competition and an industry-wide preference for chips based on the ARM architecture will be difficult to dislodge.

Still, it’s a little hard to find much fault with Intel, when the numbers so clearly demonstrate that, despite the conventional wisdom, it is clearly at the height of its powers.

Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore expects some difficulties for Big Blue stemming mainly from the company’s exposure to the troubled economies of the euro zone and related currency weaknesses there. He expects the company to report sales of $29.8 billion and per-share earnings of $4.62, with his sales forecast slightly more optimistic than that of the consensus of Wall Street analysts.

Even so, he expects the strength of the U.S. dollar relative to the euro in recent months will create a headwind effect worth about 2 percentage points compared to IBM’s prior forecast in October. “Although the stronger dollar is likely to impact reported revenue, IBM remains one of the most defensive names in our universe due to its high exposure to recurring profit streams, past backlog growth and wide geographic and business diversification,” he wrote in a note to clients yesterday.

Hardware sales should be in line with forecasts as IBM has continued to gain market share away from Hewlett-Packard and Oracle. Services should continue to be a sign of IBM’s strength as its backlog of prior contracts should continue to deliver a stable stream of revenue.

One problem may come from service bookings. Whitmore thinks the consensus estimates on this closely watched number are, at $21.5 billion, a little high and thus could disappoint. IBM announced only five deals in the fourth quarter compared to seven in the same quarter of 2010. And though information about the size of the deals was limited generally, two of them combined to amount to about $740 million. “IBM’s services bookings figure is always a wildcard and the lack of many announced deals clouds visibility,” Whitmore wrote. He rates IBM a buy with a price target of $210.

The earnings report will also be the first with Ginni Rometty as IBM’s new CEO. Having already had a busy first few days on the job, it will be interesting to see if she uses the occasion of an earnings conference call to announce anything new, though that’s unlikely.

While research houses like Gartner and IDC can’t seem to slash their 2012 spending forecasts fast enough to keep up with the ever-gloomier outlook, it’s a different scene in the area of servers used to build cloud services.

IHS iSuppli is out with some new research saying that the number of cloud servers sold this year will be 875,000 — or nearly double the 460,000 sold in 2010 — amounting to a surge of 35 percent over 2011, when 647,000 were sold.

And it gets better: The rate of growth is expected to continue over the next three years, in the 20 percent to 30 percent range. Cloud server sales will grow at a rate that’s five times faster than the rate of growth for general-purpose servers, iSuppli says.

And while cloud servers amount to only a 5 percent sliver of the overall server market now, by 2015, that will reach 15 percent. Apple, Google, Amazon and IBM will be pushing more cloud services to companies and to consumers; cloud-services companies like Salesforce.com, Workday and NetSuite, to name just a few, will be adding more services and more capacity as their businesses grow.

It’s good news for companies turning out servers, like Hewlett-Packard, Dell, IBM and even Cisco Systems, which is an increasingly important player in the server market, along with chipmaker Intel.

There is one wrinkle, iSuppli says. The market for server vendors is starting to widen away from the traditional vendors. When companies can’t get the customized products they want from traditional players like HP and Dell, they’re increasingly turning to Taiwanese ODM companies like Quanta and Wistron to build hardware just the way they want it.

Zynga was up 42 cents, or almost 5 percent today, to close at $8.87 a share.

That’s a huge reversal from earlier this week when the stock nosedived to an all-time low. Meanwhile, none of the traditional game makers were having such a good day.

Electronic Arts closed down $1.47, or 7.5 percent, to $18.04 a share; THQ fell 7 percent to 66 cents a share; Take-Two Interactive fell .5 percent to $14.50 a share; and industry-leading Activision Blizzard slipped 2.5 percent $12.24 a share. GameStop also traded lower, finishing off the day down 2.8 percent to $23.51 a share.

The game makers were universally feeling the impact of an NPD Group report that revealed yesterday that videogame software sales fell 8 percent in December compared to the same month in 2010. When including hardware and accessories, like game cards, the entire industry contracted by 21 percent year over year.

Potentially, investors were betting that if the traditional game-makers weren’t fairing well, then Zynga was a good bet. The leading Facebook game-maker operates purely online and on mobile, so it potentially would be more isolated from the retail and packaged goods sectors.

The old guard vs. new guard battle also played out on the front lines yesterday.

EA was dealt an additional blow when Zynga announced it had hired away Barry Cottle, head of Electronic Arts’ Interactive division. Cottle, who was in charge of the company’s digital strategy, including social and mobile games, was EA’s biggest weapon in fighting Zynga’s dominance on Facebook and had led EA’s rise on mobile.

But EA’s loss was Zynga’s gain.

The social games leader appointed Cottle to the position of EVP of business and corporate development in charge of new global partnerships, acquisitions and other development roles.

The new forecast calls for companies and governments to spend a combined $3.8 trillion on information technology, which would amount to growth of 3.7 percent from 2011. The previous forecast had called for growth of 4.6 percent.

For perspective, the difference on a dollar basis is about $100 billion, which is certainly real money, but when you consider the various puts and takes affecting the projected spend, it makes a certain amount of sense.

Gartner says that all four of the major technology sectors it tracks — computing hardware, enterprise software, IT services, and telecom equipment and services — will see their growth rates slow this year.

You can probably guess why: The uncertain global economy, the euro zone sovereign debt crisis and the disruptions on the hardware supply chain from last year’s flooding in Thailand on hard-drive production have all teamed up to perform a triple whammy on the tech sector. The Thailand problem will probably last until well into 2013, Gartner’s Richard Gordon says in a statement, echoing what Seagate CEO Steve Luczo told AllThingsD in an interview in November.

Telecom equipment spending will probably suffer the least, Gartner says. Sales in that sector will grow by nearly 7 percent to $475 billion, followed by the enterprise software market, which will grow by 6.4 percent to $285 billion. The chart at the right, which I screengrabbed from Gartner’s handout, breaks down the revised outlook by each sector versus what the previous growth outlook had been.

Gartner also trimmed its average annual growth projection for IT spending through 2015. It now expects spending to grow by about 5 percent on average, down only slightly from 5.4 percent, but in the wider scope of a few trillion dollars, a fractional change still amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars.

When you consider the fact that Lexmark is a printer company — and not even an especially large one by comparison to others in the business — you might intuitively conclude that it’s a company on the defensive.

“People don’t print anymore,” goes the refrain of conventional wisdom, “not even at the office.” It’s easier and more efficient now, when you need to refer to a digital document and have it close at hand, to send it to a tablet like an iPad, or even to a smartphone.

And yet, Lexmark is anything but on the defensive. It has been expanding in recent years, primarily by acquisition. In October, it spent $50 million to acquire Pallas Athena, a Dutch software firm specializing in managing and automating business processes — the flow of information through a company. Lexmark combined Pallas Athena with its previous acquisition, Perceptive Software, for which it paid $280 million in 2010; Kansas-based Perceptive specializes in managing unstructured data. Lexmark CEO Paul Rooke says that the two companies combined give Lexmark a position that is unique among companies in the printer business: The ability to help a customer manage and access information in whatever format makes the most sense.

While Lexmark is significantly smaller by revenue than its biggest rival — Hewlett-Packard’s printing division booked $26 billion in fiscal 2011, while Lexmark is on track to report about $4.2 billion in revenue, according to the consensus view of analysts — it is still able to win business away from its larger rivals, and keep those customers. I asked Rooke about this in a recent conversation:

AllThingsD: Paul, the conventional wisdom has held for a long time that printing was a dying business, and that paper was going to go away because everything would be digital. I think that’s been the general criticism of Lexmark since it first spun out of IBM 20 years ago. What do you think of that?

Paul Rooke: We’ve always seen ourselves not so much as a hardware company. When we started, back in 1991, we were evolving from printers to multifunction printers to fleet management. You can see that in our actions. We also want customers for life. We create industry-specific solutions in a responsible way. It’s not just the blocking and tackling of managing a company’s fleet of printers, but it’s about getting intimate with their business processes and managing the paper and ink and so on. And as we’ve evolved, we’ve become more of a solutions company. We like to say “print less, save more.” When we say that, we’re all about helping with smart devices and managing that fleet. But it also refers to capturing, managing and accessing content within the context of a business process.

Well, let’s talk about that a little. When you say “capturing and managing content and information,” what does that mean?

As we found ourselves managing these multifunction devices that have scanners built into them, we found ourselves capturing content off of paper and into digital infrastructure, and we’re looking to do more of that than we have been. You’ll see us do more interpretation of content and automatically routing documents according to what’s on them. But it doesn’t stop there. We found ourselves scanning documents and putting them somewhere and managing them. Our acquisition of Perceptive Software last year has really strengthened that as a value-add for us. A lot of the content that comes in is this messy unstructured content, and with Perceptive, we’re able to help customers manage this unstructured content and finally access it in the context of their business process. And that’s where our Pallas Athena acquisition comes in. When you put it all together, it puts us in a unique position in the industry. We’re not just a printer maker, but we link into the business processes and provide added value for our customers.

“Unstructured data” is a phrase I hear a lot. What does it mean, specifically, to Lexmark?

It’s anything that doesn’t fit in massive databases that are arranged in traditional rows and columns, like financial information and shipping information. In contrast, you might take something like an admission system at a university. It might have some core intake information that’s structured, like a name and birthdate, but then there’s a lot of other information around it, like transcripts and reference letters, that goes into making a decision. Another example is in hospitals, where you have a doctor or nurse looking into a patient file. All hospitals have information systems that keep track of the basic information on a patient. But then there’s other information — like blood tests and X-rays — that’s unstructured, which the doctor will want to look at in order to make a better-informed decision. As you go around in all industries, there are a lot of examples of this sort of data. It really appears in all business environments.

And yet, the core business is still printers and printing. And for myself, I find myself printing a lot less, sending things I need to refer to to my iPhone or iPad and skipping the printer. Do people like me represent a long-term danger to you, or is that really just an issue of perception?

When you look at information generally, the amount of information and content that’s being generated just continues to grow. The ability to access it in an organized fashion is a key challenge for customers, whether they print it or not. But with that growth in information, even if a smaller percentage is printed, there’s still an opportunity for growth in absolute terms. But having said that, as our strategy has evolved, if a customer chooses to print it or store it, we’re going to be there for them. We’re trying to put the tools and technology in place for whichever way the customer goes. There’s a number of industries — government is one, social services is another — where there are customer-facing industries, where you need to fill out a form or a document that requires a signature; many still prefer paper, because it’s inexpensive and easy. Some choose to do that digitally, some choose paper. And when we talk to customers, they’re asking for help in bridging those two worlds. That’s where we jump in and help.

What is the most important thing that customers are saying to you, in terms of their needs? Is it all cost control, which is top of mind so often these days? Or is it something more?

Cost control is certainly there, as is lower-cost devices. These are certainly propositions that play well with customers who want to reduce the cost of their imaging infrastructure. When we engage customers in the managed-service relationship, they often don’t even know how many printers, copiers, fax machines and scanners they have, until we help them assess it and optimize it and hook their devices into a system that helps them control it all. And our managed print services are helping them keep those costs under control. The other thing we’re hearing about is process improvement. With Perceptive, and now Pallas Athena, we help them understand better what their processes are. We have a lot of technologies that map these processes out — not what you think they are, but what they really are. So many times, when you do process improvement, you spend months in a conference room, drawing out what you think the process is on a white board. We can eliminate that step by plugging in the tools and doing a quick digital assessment of what the process actually is, and map it for you digitally. So if you think your process is made up of steps A, B and C, we can come and show you that there’s also D, E, F and G that you didn’t think of. We’ll show you why they’re there, and where the bottlenecks are, with factual data you can work with. Which is a lot better than speculation.

Where do you think your competitors — and name whomever you want — are vulnerable? Where are you winning business away from competitors?

We turned 20 years old this year. Many thought we wouldn’t survive. I think, while the technologies have certainly evolved, the thing that has differentiated us from our competitors is our depth. We go deep with our customers, and get very intimate with them in their industry and their environment and their processes. That’s why customers buy Lexmark. When we’re up against people like HP or Xerox or others, we’re able to get closer to the customer than they are, and do things in a more customized fashion. I think we’ll be doing more of that as we fill out our technology set.

So what kinds of things should we expect from Lexmark in 2012? Are you done doing acquisitions?

You’ll see us enhance our capabilities. Some people think we’re moving away from printing, and that’s not it at all. But we’re adding to it. In addition to that, we’ll continue to integrate Perceptive and Pallas Athena into a more integrated suite of solutions. That will put us in a unique position. The acquisitions are part of the strategy. When we identify gaps or holes in our offerings, we look to fill them either organically or inorganically with acquisitions. We’ll continue to look at those as part of the strategy. We’re not looking for a big one. The ones we have done have been smaller, but of companies with technologies that have high potential for synergies. But we’re still looking.

So what happened? A few things, as Oracle execs tried to explain on a conference call.

• The currency effect: As President and CFO Safra Catz explained, what had been a 1 percent tailwind for currency effects turned into a 2 percent headwind. With all the violent swings in the value of currencies around the world as compared to the U.S. dollar, Oracle suffered a negative effect that pinched revenue.

• Deals didn’t close during the quarter: Catz said that in the final days and weeks of the quarter, some customers added an extra layer of executive approval to close deals to buy Oracle stuff. That meant that some deals Oracle had expected to close before the quarter’s end moved into the next quarter. Catz said that Oracle has taken steps to better manage deal flow to take this into account. It is consistent, however, with recent statements from other enterprise IT vendors, like IBM and NetApp.
• Transitions: Oracle’s SPARC server business just switched to a new chip called the T4, which was unveiled late in the quarter. The machines require a total upgrade, and that means a lot of testing with existing applications, which can slow down deals for the new machines, while at the same time sapping demand for the prior generation of products. That had a lot to do with hardware sales dropping by 14 percent year over year to $953 million. As Catz put it: “We saw good early demand for the new SPARC SuperCluster, but only released the product for general availability at the very end of the quarter, allowing us to ship only a couple.”

Catz also predicted that hardware sales will decline as much as 14 percent this quarter, although CEO Larry Ellison was bullish on its growth prospects later this year. New software license revenue, a key metric gauging software sales, is expected to grow in a range of 2 percent to 12 percent. Total sales are expected to grow in the range of 3 percent to 7 percent, and per-share earnings are expected to come in between 56 and 59 cents, which is in line with the consensus of analysts.

There were a few things that went right. Ellison did what he usually does on a conference call, and crowed about examples where Oracle is beating a competitor. This time, the targets were IBM, Cisco Systems and SAP, but not his usual punching bag, Hewlett-Packard. Oracle won several competitive deals from Big Blue and Cisco, as well, with customers as varied as Australia’s University of Melbourne, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Hyundai Kia Motor Company.

Ellison also hinted that Apple is a big Oracle customer. He mentioned a “a very large American smartphone manufacturer” that had bought more than 30 Oracle Exadata systems as it built out its cloud. Unless I’m missing something, there’s really only one company that fits that description, and that’s Apple. Its use of Oracle gear within the mix at its North Carolina data centers has been speculated about before, but never confirmed by Apple directly. (Big surprise, that.)

The electronics manufacturer placed behind Target, Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Amazon, according to a comScore report that analyzed online shopping trends the day after Thanksgiving.

“Apple has not historically been in the top five — in fact, this is the first time I can remember,” said Andrew Lipsman, an analyst at comScore, who added that Apple was “nipping at Target’s heels,” registering only a few percentage points lower in overall traffic.

The strong ranking backs up a report today by 9to5Mac that said Apple’s Black Friday sales were “off the charts.” According to its sources, Apple blew away forecasts by 7 pm, and broke records for its biggest sales day ever.

ComScore’s figures include both Apple’s site as well as iTunes, so any resulting sales would encompass both hardware and digital products, such as apps and videos.

Separately, Experian Hitwise ranked Apple as the 12th most-visited retail site on Black Friday. It said the company’s total visits jumped 42 percent compared to 2010.

In both of these circumstances, what’s notable is Apple’s apparent mind share among consumers.

Best Buy, like some other retailers, is trying hard this season to be the go-to source for Apple products, running new TV ads promoting the chain as a place to buy Macs, iPads and iPhones. But Apple was able to rival gigantic big-box retailers, which carry thousands of products, including their own.

That’s impressive, especially since its discounts are generally not.

Lipsman agreed: “Even though Apple does not provide the selection of products that you might find at a big box retailer, it is obviously top of mind when it comes to the most in-demand products, like the iPhone and iPad. Two of the biggest growth sectors right now are tablets and digital content downloads, and obviously Apple is extremely well positioned on both fronts.”

In a market that grew overall by more than 5 percent to $12.3 billion in revenues and 2.2 million servers sold, HP and IBM were neck and neck on a revenue basis, each accounting for about $3.8 billion, or about 29 percent of the market, followed by Dell, Oracle and Fujitsu.

On a unit basis, HP was the undisputed king, selling 693,000 servers, which works out to an average price of about $5,500 each. IBM sold 288,000 at an average price north of $13,000. Dell sold 518,000 servers.

For HP, both figures represented year-on-year declines of about 3 percent, and are roughly in line with the results HP reported last week. HP said that sales of industry standard servers, meaning those that run regular Intel chips, were down 4 percent, and business critical servers — the ones that run the exotic Intel Itanium chip — were down 23 percent, thanks in no small part to the ongoing scrap with Oracle.

Generally, the server market was healthy worldwide, except in Western Europe, where sales declined by about 5 percent. Asia, on the other had, made up for that by growing nearly 24 percent. Eastern Europe did even better, growing more than 27 percent.

Demand was strongest for basic x86 servers, running chips from either Intel or Advanced Micro Devices, where growth was north of 9 percent on a revenue basis. Servers running Itanium and RISC chips, which include things like IBM’s Power architecture and Oracle’s SPARC, declined on a per-unit basis, but oddly saw revenue increase a little, meaning that those machines sold are for one reason or another commanding a higher price.

(Image from Treehugger.com)

Now we call them blade servers, and today they account for about 15 percent of the world’s servers, with vendors as varied as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle and Fujitsu.

But the fundamental problems facing those who buy servers in large quantities remain the same: Technology demands more computing cycles, which servers with ever more powerful chips can certainly deliver, but companies have limited space to put them, limited power resources to run them and cool them, and limited ability to pay for it all.

Today Hewlett-Packard aims to change the discussion about the future of servers with something it calls Project Moonshot. The idea is pretty straightforward: Cram 2,800 servers into a single rack that would today house a few dozen, or at most 128, blade servers. Make them all share the same internal networking, cooling and power supplies and generally boost the number of servers that can fit into a defined space. One way or another, more efficiency is badly needed, and as Parthasarathy Ranganathan, a Fellow at HP Research I talked to yesterday, told me, the time has come to stop trying to squeeze “blood from a stone” in order to get it, but rather do something more radical.

The headline that everyone is paying attention to is that HP has selected an ARM-based chip from a Texas-based start-up called Calxeda as the chip it will use in its development platform, called Redstone. ARM, as you know, is a flavor of chip technology designed by the British firm ARM Holdings that’s widely used in mobile phones because it is very power efficient. ARM has recently started to make some inroads into general-use personal computing against the Intel- and AMD-based world of x86 computing.

But it’s less important to focus on the chips that HP is using here than on the fundamental shift that HP is trying to create. “We’re not trying to start a new chip war,” Glenn Keels, HP’s director of marketing for HP’s Hyperscale business, told me. There’s no reason that Intel’s Atom chips couldn’t one day be just as suitable for this. Make no mistake, though: ARM chips are coming to servers, one way or another.

Aside from the Redstone development platform, HP also aims to let potential customers kick the tires of the Redstone-style servers by running their applications on them and seeing how they perform versus traditional servers in a series of development labs that the company will open around the world. The first will be in Houston, and it will open in January. More will follow next year in Europe and Asia.

HP also named a handful of partners that are participating in the Moonshot project by contributing hardware, software and technical expertise. Among them are AMD; Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu flavor of Linux; and Red Hat, the enterprise Linux company. It all looks very interesting, and if HP can nudge the industry in a direction where millions of servers packed into data centers can consume significantly less energy than they do now, everyone should be happier. The benefits would be the increased availability of computing power at a lower cost, with less relative energy consumption and therefore less impact on the environment. It’s hard to argue with any of that.

Here’s an HP video explaining what Project Moonshot is all about.

(Image is the cover of an extremely inaccurate 1959 children’s book imagining what a routine flight to the moon might be like for a 6-year-old boy.)

Now that new HP CEO Meg Whitman has decided to keep the PC business rather than spin it out as her predecessor Léo Apotheker had proposed, HP appears to be heading back, however slowly, toward the kind of stability for which it had long been known.

But can it still perform? Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi took the opportunity to examine the company’s business units and finds that, yes, the prospects for growth aren’t unreasonable. The current portfolio of HP’s business, he estimates, is likely to grow its sales organically by a combined 2.5 percent on an annual basis going forward. Add to that additional growth from the planned shifts toward higher-margin IT service, networking and software businesses, and the picture gets brighter, Sacconaghi writes in a note to clients issued yesterday. HP, he argues, should be able to grow its per-share earnings by 9 to 10 percent annually over the next three to five years.

Part of his assumption is that HP uses about $4 billion of its $8-$10 billion in annual free cash flow for share buybacks, which will help goose earnings on a per-share basis by reducing the number of outstanding shares; plus another $3 billion annually for acquisitions, buying companies at reasonable multiples of about five times revenue.

So how does each sector of HP’s business look?

PCs: Sacconaghi reckons that the global market for PCs will grow about 6 percent a year on a unit basis, down from historical averages of about 10 percent, and that it will grow on a revenue basis by about 2 percent a year through 2015. As the biggest supplier of PCs in the world, HP will, at the very least, hold its market share. While PCs are HP’s largest business, accounting for $40 billion in its last fiscal year and about one-third of its overall sales, the unit generates only 13 percent of operating profits. And, yes, while tablets are a threat, Sacconaghi sees no reason that PCs and tablets can’t grow together. The increasing need for an Internet connection everywhere and the increasing amount that consumers are willing to spend on technology, coupled with price declines over time, mean that consumers will be willing to spend more on notebooks and tablets.

Printers: As with PCs, HP is the market leader in printers, and as that market grows its revenue by about 3 percent a year, HP will probably hold on to its share of the market. Tablets may have a long-term impact on printing behavior, but Sacconaghi argues that consumer behavior tends to change slowly. A decade ago, he says, investors worried that email and the paperless office would kill printing. “Despite these ostensible headwinds, HP and Lexmark collectively grew their supplies revenues by 7 percent per year between 2000 and 2010, driving low to mid single digit growth for the printer industry.” HP’s printer division accounted for $25.8 billion in revenues in the last fiscal year, or about 20 percent overall, and because of its 17 percent operating margin, delivered 29 percent of the company’s profits. It’s a classic razor blade business, as HP loses between 20 and 25 percent on the printing hardware, only to make it up on supplies that command a 60 percent margin. The presence of tablets could actually boost printing, and thus increase the sale of those supplies down the road. Overall, the printer business should continue to grow at about 3 percent a year, Sacconaghi says.

Enterprise, servers, storage and networking: Sacconaghi expects HP to grow revenues in the ESSN unit by about 2 percent a year, slightly below the industry growth rate of 3 percent. He bases this on the expectation that HP can grow its networking business, hold its market share in the Intel-based servers, and lose share in its enterprise storage business to players like EMC and NetApp, and also lose share in the Unix storage business because of Oracle’s decision not to support the Itanium chip.

Services: This unit should grow by about 2 percent annually, slower than the market, which is growing at 4 percent. “We believe that outsourcing is a maturing business, and that EDS, which HP purchased in 2008, is and was an underperforming asset,” Sacconaghi writes. “As a result, we forecast HP’s outsourcing revenues to remain flat.” Expect it to grow in line with the enterprise hardware business, and along with the consulting business.

Software: The market research firm IDC expects the end markets for HP’s software to grow by 7 percent a year. If you assume that HP makes more software acquisitions, which Sacconaghi does, then you can reasonably predict its software revenue will grow by 10 percent a year.

So what’s the risk to all this? Leadership. “Ultimately, our projections for HP are predicated on the company choosing a disciplined financial approach to running the company that includes modest revenue growth, small and leverageable acquisitions, a strong operations focus, and high returns of capital to shareholders,” Sacconaghi writes. The last two CEOs who tried to “transform” HP — Carly Fiorina and Léo Apotheker — failed.

HP’s isn’t “broken,” but in fact offers a favorable risk for patient investors, Sacconaghi says. He rates HP shares as an “outperform,” with a price target of $37.

“Glad that long national nightmare is over.”

That was the comment — paraphrased from Gerald Ford’s inaugural address upon the close of the Nixon presidency — that I received in an email from an industry source on Friday. The quote was sent in reference to the now-concluded business surrounding Hewlett-Packard’s exploration of “strategic options” concerning its Personal Systems Group.

Now that HP CEO Meg Whitman has concluded that the company is stronger with PCs than without them, there remains a fair bit of unfinished business from the dog’s breakfast of changes announced on Aug. 18.

First and foremost are the questions about the future — or lack thereof — of HP’s webOS business.

The only thing we know for certain is that HP is out of the business of hardware that runs the operating system it picked up in last year’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm. HP killed that business after sales of its TouchPad tablet device proved initially disappointing, only to see reduced prices spark a surge in interest from buyers.

During a conference call with analysts earlier this week, Whitman conceded that HP “needs to be in the tablet business” — and that it intends to participate in that business using Microsoft’s tablet-friendly Windows 8 operating system. She also said a long-term decision regarding the webOS software business is forthcoming within the “next couple of months.” HP has already carried out a round of layoffs in that division.

Another not very encouraging sign amid the ongoing uncertainty is the departure of Richard Kerris — who had headed up HP’s webOS developer outreach efforts — for a similar Windows-related job at Nokia.

And related to that is the fate of Jon Rubinstein, the former CEO of Palm and former head of Apple’s iPod business unit. Once the public face of webOS — and of Palm before that, as its final CEO — he has not been visible at all during any of HP’s recent upheavals.

That said, rumors have been almost nonexistent about Rubinstein seeking or being recruited for a job elsewhere. It’s not like he needs the work, but his apparent future is about as cloudy as that of the webOS itself. Currently he’s a product guy without a product; his role at HP is unclear. In July, he was bumped from his title as general manager of the webOS unit and moved into an iffy “product innovation role” within PSG.

One thing is true: Rubinstein has a close relationship with Todd Bradley, who leads the PSG unit.

At least Bradley’s fate is cleared up: The high-profile exec has been the subject of numerous reports and rumors, including a March report in The Wall Street Journal that said he had been recruited by chipmaker Intel. Since then, Bradley has been regularly asked about his future plans.

It was an open secret in Silicon Valley that Bradley feuded with HP’s prior CEO, Léo Apotheker, and was not consulted about the PSG spinoff plan before it was floated to the public.

Still, he stood the best chance of being named the CEO of whatever new company emerged from the plan. Yet Bradley’s voice was heard solidly behind Whitman’s yesterday, both on the conference call and in an interview with AllThingsD.

Bradley made it clear he intends to stay with HP for the forseeable future. His tone, both in public comments and in that joint interview with Whitman, seemed sincere — meaning he has likely arrived at some understanding with Whitman that will keep him at HP.

And Whitman can’t afford to lose a key member of an important business unit just now. (Although, as he has been passed over three times for HP’s top job in recent years, any lingering hopes that Bradley may have harbored of ever being CEO are probably now dashed.)

Outside of the consumer and PC space is the matter of Autonomy, the British software firm for which HP paid $11.7 billion, in a deal also announced on Aug. 18. There’s no question that the purchase price was high, representing a 64 percent premium above Autonomy’s share price, for starters. Many investors have frowned upon the deal, and some have even gone so far as to sue HP over how it was handled, mainly because HP shares cratered after it was announced. What is still to be fully explained is how HP extracts enough value from Autonomy — and if enough value can be extracted to justify the price paid.

Finally, there’s the matter of HP’s results in the coming quarter. With the company in a quiet period ahead of its Nov. 21 earnings announcement, there are few hints as to whether or not HP will meet its already reduced expectations for the quarter. Whitman insisted that no major announcements are expected before then, suggesting that there won’t be any negative pre-announcements.

But much will depend on the tone of the forward guidance HP gives as it looks to 2012. With its shares down nearly 33 percent so far this year — they closed Friday at $27.94, up 85 cents, or more than 3 percent, following Thursday’s decision — it can’t afford to miss another quarter. Once a tech company known for the stability it has given investors, HP has had nothing but unpleasant surprises for the last 14 months.

Now that one piece of the evolving story of the new HP is settled, many more are still in motion.

I talked about this and many of HP’s issues on The Wall Street Journal’s online “Markets Hub” show on Friday, and have embedded it here:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111029/hewlett-packard-one-messy-piece-of-business-cleared-up-but-many-to-go/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111025/ibm-has-a-new-ceo-meet-virginia-rometty/ http://allthingsd.com/20111025/ibm-has-a-new-ceo-meet-virginia-rometty/#comments Tue, 25 Oct 2011 20:29:10 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=136618 Speculation has been running fairly consistent for awhile now that there would soon be a new CEO at IBM, as Sam Palmisano approached the company’s typical retirement age. Today the company’s board of directors named Virginia Rometty, senior vice president and group executive for sales, marketing and strategy, as the new CEO. She’ll take over at the start of the new year. Palmisano will continue as chairman.

According to IBM’s official bio on her, she goes by the name “Ginni.” In her current job, she’s been responsible for revenue, profit, and client satisfaction globally and has been in charge of strategy, marketing and communications.

Before that she ran Big Blue’s global business services unit and helmed the tricky integration of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, which was a key acquisition in 2002, as it became the lynchpin of IBM’s strategically important services business. You may remember that Hewlett-Packard tried and failed to acquire the PwC Consulting business during the Carly Fiorina era. At that time, HP proposed paying $17 billion and change, but negotiations fell through. IBM swooped in and took it out for less than $4 billion in 2002.

Rometty’s naming as CEO makes it an interesting moment in history. With Meg Whitman at the helm of HP, women now run the two biggest IT companies by revenue in the world.

IBM’s statement is below.

ARMONK, N.Y.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– The IBM (NYSE:IBM – News) board of directors has elected Virginia M. Rometty president and chief executive officer of the company, effective January 1, 2012. She was also elected a member of the board of directors, effective at that time. Ms. Rometty is currently IBM senior vice president and group executive for sales, marketing and strategy. She succeeds Samuel J. Palmisano, who currently is IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer. Mr. Palmisano will remain chairman of the board.

“Ginni Rometty has successfully led several of IBM’s most important businesses over the past decade – from the formation of IBM Global Business Services to the build-out of our Growth Markets Unit,” Mr. Palmisano said. “But she is more than a superb operational executive. With every leadership role, she has strengthened our ability to integrate IBM’s capabilities for our clients. She has spurred us to keep pace with the needs and aspirations of our clients by deepening our expertise and industry knowledge. Ginni’s long-term strategic thinking and client focus are seen in our growth initiatives, from cloud computing and analytics to the commercialization of Watson. She brings to the role of CEO a unique combination of vision, client focus, unrelenting drive, and passion for IBMers and the company’s future. I know the board agrees with me that Ginni is the ideal CEO to lead IBM into its second century.”

Ms. Rometty said: “There is no greater privilege in business than to be asked to lead IBM, especially at this moment. Sam had the courage to transform the company based on his belief that computing technology, our industry, even world economies would shift in historic ways. All of that has come to pass. Today, IBM’s strategies and business model are correct. Our ability to execute and deliver consistent results for clients and shareholders is strong. This is due to Sam’s leadership, his discipline, and his unshakable belief in the ability of IBM and IBMers to lead into the future. Sam taught us, above all, that we must never stop reinventing IBM.”

Mr. Palmisano, 60, became IBM chief executive officer in 2002 and chairman of the board in 2003. During his tenure, IBM exited commoditizing businesses, including PCs, printers and hard disk drives, and greatly increased investments in high-value businesses and technologies. He has overseen the significant expansion of IBM in the emerging markets of China, India, Brazil, Russia and dozens of other developing countries, transforming IBM from a multinational into a globally integrated enterprise. In 2008, he launched IBM’s Smarter Planet strategy, which describes the company’s view of the next era of information technology and its impact on business and society.

Since Mr. Palmisano became CEO, IBM has set records in pre-tax earnings, earnings per share, and free cash flow. During Mr. Palmisano’s tenure, IBM increased EPS by almost five times, generated over $100 billion in free cash flow, and invested more than $50 billion in research and development – creating over $100 billion of shareholder value since 2002 through an increase in market capitalization and dividends paid.

As global sales leader for IBM, Ms. Rometty, 54, is accountable for revenue, profit, and client satisfaction in the 170 global markets in which IBM does business. She is responsible for IBM’s worldwide results, which exceeded $99 billion in 2010. She also is responsible for leading IBM’s global strategy, marketing and communications functions. Previously, Ms. Rometty was senior vice president of IBM Global Business Services. In that role, she led the successful integration of PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting — the largest acquisition in professional services history, building a global team of more than 100,000 business consultants and services experts. She has also served as general manager of IBM Global Services, Americas, and of IBM’s Global Insurance and Financial Services Sector.

Ms. Rometty joined IBM in 1981 as a systems engineer. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree with high honors in computer science and electrical engineering from Northwestern University.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111025/ibm-has-a-new-ceo-meet-virginia-rometty/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111017/ibm-results-fall-short-of-forecasts/ http://allthingsd.com/20111017/ibm-results-fall-short-of-forecasts/#comments Mon, 17 Oct 2011 20:23:52 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=132993 IBM reported quarterly estimates that slightly beat the Street, but sales that were slightly behind the consensus of Wall Street analysts.

The company reported per share earnings of $3.28 on sales of $26.2 billion. Analysts had estimated sales to come in at $26.25 billion and per-share earnings of $3.22.

IBM raised its guidance on its outlook for earnings in the 2011 fiscal year to at least $13.35 from $13.25 previously. The company is working toward a publicly stated goal of delivering $20 per share in earnings by its fiscal year 2015.

IBM shares fell nearly 2 percent ahead of the report and closed at $186.94 during regular trading. The shares fell further in after-hours trading, dropping $8.53, or more than 4 percent, to 182.00 soon after closing. The shares are up nearly 30 percent since the start of the year.

The growth in revenue amounts to 8 percent, or 3 percent after adjusting for currency implications. Operating income grew by $4 billion or 9 percent. IBM’s operating margin was 46.8 percent, up 1.5 points.

Services revenue was up 8 percent, and IBM reported a services backlog of $137 billion, up $2.4 billion. Revenues from the software sales were $5.8 billion, an increase of 13 percent. Hardware sales totaled $4.5 billion for the quarter, up 4 percent. Financing revenues decreased 2 percent in the third quarter to $520 million. Perhaps this is why Big Blue made a big push on financing for small businesses last month.

On the brighter side, IBM did well in growth markets. They accounted for 23 percent of sales and contributed more than half of IBM’s sales growth on a constant currency basis so far this year. Forty of those countries all reported double-digit sales growth in the quarter.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111017/ibm-results-fall-short-of-forecasts/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111017/how-long-can-ibm-keep-going-like-this/ http://allthingsd.com/20111017/how-long-can-ibm-keep-going-like-this/#comments Mon, 17 Oct 2011 18:44:21 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=132944 IBM will report quarterly earnings after the close of markets today. Having demonstrated some strength in the year of its 100th anniversary, Big Blue finds itself with its own unique set of challenges, says analyst Toni Sacconaghi of Bernstein Research in a note to clients today.

IBM, he says, should meet expectations for the quarter by delivering per-share earnings of $3.31, slightly better than the consensus estimate of $3.21. On top of that, he expects IBM to raise its guidance for earnings on the year to $13.35 per share or higher. Sacconaghi says IBM may earn as much as $13.60 a share this year, depending on how much it ultimately saves from workforce reductions and a lower tax rate. He says that IBM has beat its consensus in each of its last 15 quarters and raised annual earnings guidance in nine of its last 11 quarters.

All good, right? Sure, but how long can IBM keep this sort of thing going? Certainly not forever, especially in a tough global economy. Revenue growth this year will be difficult to compare to last year, Sacconaghi writes, especially in light of a stronger U.S. dollar, a slowing business cycle in hardware upgrades and a slowdown in services growth over the last 18 months. As such, his estimates for revenue growth are below those of the Street consensus: Where the Street expects IBM to report sales of nearly $112 billion in fiscal 2012, Sacconaghi expects $109.3 billion.

“IBM has benefited from a favorable currency environment, which has boosted the company’s headline revenue growth number, which is likely to reverse and pressure IBM’s reported revenues in the first half of 2012 at current spot rates,” he writes. “While we don’t expect this to lead to earnings misses versus the consensus given that IBM hedges, we believe that revenue estimates need to be revised downwards from current levels.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111017/how-long-can-ibm-keep-going-like-this/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111003/oracle-launches-exalytics-machine-probably-ending-spat-with-autonomy/ http://allthingsd.com/20111003/oracle-launches-exalytics-machine-probably-ending-spat-with-autonomy/#comments Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:06:05 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=127559 In a way, you could sort of see how the mishegas that has gone on between Oracle and Autonomy over the last few days was leading up to some larger purpose. For Oracle, that is. It’s not every day that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison deliberately provokes a very public fight with another company that results in back-and-forth press releases, leaked emails, publication of previously confidential PowerPoint slides and so on.

But apparently it all did lead up to something. For those just tuning in, here’s how it went down.

About two weeks ago, on Oracle’s quarterly earnings conference call, Ellison was asked by an analyst about Oracle’s position in the market for analyzing and pulling useful intelligence from unstructured data — transcripts of videos and contents of emails, and scores of other things that aren’t neatly arranged in databases. It’s kind of a big deal, as companies grapple with the so-called “big data” problem, and the question was a natural jumping-off point to discussing Hewlett-Packard’s $11.7 billion acquisition of Autonomy. Ellison, by way of an answer, portrayed unstructured data as a feature of the existing Oracle database software, called it “nothing new,” and then slammed HP for paying too much for Autonomy, the British software firm whose specialty happens to be — you guessed it — unstructured data. And, oh, by the way, Ellison said he took a pass on Autonomy when it had been shopped to Oracle because he thought the price was too high.

Much drama then ensued. Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch said his company had never been shopped to Oracle. Not so, said Oracle — and oh, by the way, you left your PowerPoint slides behind. “Those slides?” Lynch countered. “Never seen ’em before in my life. Maybe you need some help with your unstructured data, because you seem confused at the sequence of events.”

You see, the spat occurred just a few days before Oracle OpenWorld, and got Oracle in stories containing the phrase “unstructured data” numerous times.

And what did Ellison talk about in his keynote address Sunday night? Lots of things. One of them was an appliance called the Exalytics Intelligence Machine that does — guess what? — unstructured data. It’s designed, Ellison said, to do all its analysis while the data is loaded into the machine’s main memory, while four 10-core Intel Xeon chips make it scream on the processor side. “Databases run faster, everything runs faster if you keep it in DRAM, if you keep it in main memory,” he said, describing it as data analysis at the “speed of thought.” Structured data, relational data, unstructured data — it does it all, Ellison said. Now all that mishegas makes sense. It’s all about having the last word.

Ellison’s keynote — an hour and change long — is below. If you want to skip forward to the Exalytics stuff, it starts at about the 57-minute mark.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111003/oracle-launches-exalytics-machine-probably-ending-spat-with-autonomy/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110930/oracle-buying-hewlett-packard-fuhgeddaboudit/ http://allthingsd.com/20110930/oracle-buying-hewlett-packard-fuhgeddaboudit/#comments Fri, 30 Sep 2011 18:40:19 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=126906 Amid all the recent drama that has unfolded at Hewlett-Packard — and the he-said she-said back and forth concerning Oracle and whether or not it was approached to buy Autonomy before HP ponied up — lies a lingering meme that refuses to die: That somehow the software giant Oracle is going to make a bid for HP.

Given the recent feuds between the management teams at the two companies, Oracle’s acquisitive history and HP’s sudden weakness, it doesn’t take much for a popular narrative of Oracle buying HP to emerge. It would be a dramatic denouement to the events of the last year that have found HP and Oracle at increasingly caustic loggerheads. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison would take some kind of victory lap and mount HP on the wall like a of trophy.

The idea gained some currency with an Aug. 21 story in the New York Post (which, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp.) arguing that HP’s $11.7 billion bid for the British software firm Autonomy, having caused shareholders to knock $12 billion and change off HP’s market cap, would therefore make HP more attractive to Oracle.

The meme gained further currency with a Bloomberg News story saying that HP’s board was “concerned” that its weakened condition had left it vulnerable to Oracle.

Let me put it like this: No. Just, no.

The first problem with the notion is this: What parts of HP would Oracle want to own? Answer: Practically none.

First, let’s look at the condition of Oracle: Its mainline software businesses are showing healthy returns, while its hardware business, built on the foundation of Sun Microsystems, the IT hardware concern it acquired last year for $7 billion, is ramping up to full speed. But here’s a fundamental truth: Software carries a higher profit margin than hardware, so when software companies buy hardware companies, they can’t avoid seeing their overall profitability erode.

Consider Oracle’s operating margin during its fiscal fourth quarter — its seasonally strongest quarter — during the last three years. In 2009, before the Sun deal was closed, it was 43.4 percent. In 2010, after the Sun deal was closed, it was 38.3 percent. In 2011 it was 41.6 percent. And during Oracle’s most recent conference call, CFO Safra Catz said Oracle hopes to get back to “pre-Sun” operating margins soon.

Now let’s look at HP and its operating margins: In its most recent quarter ended July, HP’s enterprise, storage and networking business turned in operating margins of 13 percent, which were down from 14 percent in the prior year’s period. The story was the same in practically every other HP business unit: Operating margins in services fell from 15.7 percent to 13 percent; in software they fell from 28 percent to 19.7 percent; imaging and printing margins fell to 14.6 percent from 16.9 percent. The only place they increased was the personal systems group — the PC unit that’s being considered for a spinoff — where they grew year on year from 4.7 percent to 5.9 percent.

Conclusion: Owning HP would do nothing good for Oracle’s profitability, especially at a moment when the stated goal is to nudge them up.

There’s more. As Mark L. Moerdler, an analyst at Bernstein Research, argued in a research note to clients on Sept. 26, software accounts for about 2 percent of revenue at HP. And what software it has is not the type that Oracle typically likes. When Oracle does acquisitions, it grabs companies that make applications that plug holes in its own product portfolio. The majority of HP’s software offerings — Autonomy nothwithstanding — deal with infrastructure management, not exactly a priority for Oracle. It is, however, a business where IBM and Computer Associates participate.

And there are two historically important business units at HP that would be outliers at Oracle: PCs and printers. Oracle has no interest in either one, and it’s hard to see that changing. Combined they make up more than half of HP’s annual revenue. In the hands of Oracle, they would probably end up being spun out, either together or separately, but why buy a whole company only to chop off more than half of it — a half that’s shrinking at that — at what would have to be unfavorable terms.

Let’s not forget the valuation estimate of HP’s $40 billion PC business: Analysts have expected that a hypothetical buyer might pay as little as $8 billion for it, or about one-fifth trailing revenue. Why go to all that trouble?

Further: Why would Oracle buy a company that’s roughly one-quarter exposed to the consumer market. Sure, HP has a retail distribution network that’s the envy of the PC industry. But Oracle would rather sell those retailers systems to help them manage their businesses, not the PCs they in turn resell at razor-thin margins.

If that’s not enough, then there’s one key bit about HP that Oracle would actively dislike. HP, by virtue of being the biggest distributor of Windows-based PCs and servers, is the world’s largest reseller of Microsoft Windows. If there’s anything more utterly antithetical to Oracle’s core values than helping put money in Microsoft’s pocket, I haven’t heard of it.

Finally, there’s the issue of cash. Even in its weakened state, HP is trading at a market cap of $45 billion and change. Assuming a premium for the whole thing, that pushes a hypothetical price tag to $60 billion. That’s too rich, even for Oracle, whose balance sheet as of Aug. 31 contained a combined $31.6 billion in cash and marketable securities. It would have to take on a tremendous amount of debt — amounting to 82 percent of fiscal 2011 sales — to get such a deal started, let alone closed.

HP’s directors and shareholders can rest easy. They have many worries about the Silicon Valley icon and the troubles in which it finds itself. But being acquired by Oracle isn’t one of them.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110930/oracle-buying-hewlett-packard-fuhgeddaboudit/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110922/audio-the-meg-whitman-era-at-hp-begins-with-a-conference-call/ http://allthingsd.com/20110922/audio-the-meg-whitman-era-at-hp-begins-with-a-conference-call/#comments Thu, 22 Sep 2011 22:51:35 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=124020 And just like that, Hewlett-Packard, one of the world’s biggest technology companies and a Silicon Valley and American corporate icon, has a new CEO: Meg Whitman.

Whitman made her first pronouncements to the public and to the HP rank and file on a conference call today, along with Chairman — newly named executive chairman — Ray Lane. I recorded the call and pulled out some highlights you can hear below, courtesy of SoundCloud.

The decision to oust now former CEO Léo Apotheker was made after the board of directors observed “operational weaknesses” in his management. “It became increasingly clear that we needed new leadership to focus on operating our business more effectively to meet the challenges of today’s environment,” Lane said. “The board believes that the job of CEO requires additional attributes to successfully execute on the company’s strategic evolution.”

Whitman admitted that HP hasn’t been delivering the kind of results that investors have come to expect. “We’re not happy about it,” she said, promising that HP will have no higher priority than to get HP’s operations back on track. Her first public comments as CEO are in the audio clip below:

Meg Whitman’s First Public Comments as HP CEO by ahess247

The news of Whitman’s hiring as the new CEO obfuscated some comments from CFO Cathie Lesjak, who warned that HP may have another tough quarterly earnings report ahead. Blaming soft market conditions in Europe and from government agencies, Lesjak said HP will likely meet its per-share guidance issued on Aug. 18, non-GAAP earnings of $1.12 to $1.16 a share. However, she said she feels “less certainty with regard to revenue,” specifically around hardware sales. HP had forecast revenues in the range of $32.1 billion to $32.5 billion.

I’ve talked with sources familiar with retail PC sales, who tell me that the back-to-school season was pretty good in terms of the number of machines sold, but that PC manufacturers, including HP, had to slash prices aggressively to keep consumers interested and buying. That may turn out to be a contributing factor.

Another key factor will be commercial PC sales. Since HP started talking about spinning off its PC business on Aug. 18, some of its commercial customers have been acting on their uncertainty by holding back on new deals or buying from other vendors like Dell. CIOs hate uncertainty, and HP has been playing defense with many of its biggest customers since the announcement, seeking to reassure them that they can still do business with HP.

Whitman’s hiring has brought a lot of criticism that she doesn’t have sufficient experience running a large, enterprise-focused technology company. Lane defended the choice by saying that during her years running eBay, she was a big buyer of enterprise technology and that the experience should serve her well.

Raydefendsmeg by ahess247

Why not conduct an extensive search, considering candidates from both inside and out? Toni Sacconaghi, author of last week’s stinging research report about “exasperated” HP investors, asked about that. The implication was that HP’s board of directors had acted impulsively in hiring Apotheker last year and was doing so again in hiring Whitman. Lane reminded Sacconaghi that HP’s board has eight new members since those days, so it’s not the same group of people involved with the Hurd resignation and the Apotheker hiring. Hear his answer below:

Why no search at HP? by ahess247

And yet, despite having sent Apotheker to the exit, HP still intends to follow through, in broad brushstrokes, with the strategy he laid out. HP is still studying what to do with its Personal Systems Group, the unit that sells PCs to consumers and businesses. All options — a spinoff or no action at all — are still on the table. But as Whitman says here, in response to a question from Keith Bachman of BMO Capital, “That decision is not going to get better with age,” so the sooner it’s done, the better.

Decisionpsc by ahess247

Lane, asked by analyst Shannon Cross of Cross Research about the timeline of the decision to let Apotheker go, said the decision wasn’t made suddenly, but over the course of the last few quarters. After missing earnings forecasts for two quarters in a row, and with the communications mess that occurred on Aug. 18, it became clear, Lane said, that Léo had to go. Hear him explain it below:

Ray Lane: Help surround or replace? by ahess247

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110922/audio-the-meg-whitman-era-at-hp-begins-with-a-conference-call/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110921/former-ebay-ceo-meg-whitman-being-considered-for-hp-ceo-job-to-replace-apotheker/ http://allthingsd.com/20110921/former-ebay-ceo-meg-whitman-being-considered-for-hp-ceo-job-to-replace-apotheker/#comments Wed, 21 Sep 2011 15:05:59 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=122967

Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is being considered by Hewlett-Packard directors as a possible candidate for CEO, in a move that would replace its current leader Léo Apotheker, according to several sources close to the situation.

The appointment of Whitman — a longtime and experienced Silicon Valley exec, who joined the board of Hewlett-Packard in January — to the top job at HP is by no means a done deal, sources said.

But a significant contingent on the board is keen to remove Apotheker after what some directors consider a series of management mishaps.

If it occurs, it would be the second major CEO ouster in a short time — Yahoo recently fired its CEO Carol Bartz due to lackluster performance.

[UPDATE: Wall Street seems to like the Apotheker-gone idea, with HP shares spiking almost eight percent on our news, as well as a simultaneous Bloomberg report. The rise has added almost $3 billion to HP's market valuation.]

In addition, sources said Whitman has been contemplating taking another big exec job, after a 10-year stint at eBay, which was followed by an unsuccessful run as the Republican nominee for governor of California last year. Since then, she has been a part-time consultant at top venture firm Kleiner Perkins.

Her role there — which has largely been seen as a temporary one — has included acting as a strategic adviser to start-ups and evaluating investment opportunities.

Sources said Whitman — who has also been active with her family foundation — has shown some interest in talking about taking the HP job.

Turning to Whitman would not be a surprise, given there are few execs in tech experienced enough to run such a large and complex organization as HP.

Still, her expertise has mostly been in the consumer space and she has never run what is largely a hardware company and one with major enterprise clients.

So, if appointed, Whitman would need a lot of help, especially to fix one with as many troubles as HP has seen of late.

That is why the board has been meeting by phone and in person this week to talk about a range of issues, focused in part on how to spin the company out of its current cycle of bad news and what to do about the situation.

Its most recent spate of trouble was the announcement of layoffs of hundreds of employees in its Palm division.

This inevitable move to jettison Palm employees came after HP’s sudden news in August that it was shuttering its webOS hardware business.

Add to that a proposed class action lawsuit, filed Sept. 13 in the U.S. District Court for Central California, along with another handful of law firms that are launching their own investigations of HP over the move.

In the suit, according to a report by Arik Hesseldahl, an “HP shareholder named Richard Gammel alleged that comments by CEO Léo Apotheker — concerning the company’s earnings expectations, the importance of its personal computer business and plans to move ahead with devices running the webOS operating system — gave a vastly different indication of actions HP took on Aug. 18, when it killed the webOS hardware business and announced plans to spin off the PC business and spend $10 billion to acquire Autonomy.”

In other words, lots to discuss for HP’s directors, who have been under siege, essentially, ever since the former CEO Mark Hurd resigned under pressure more than a year ago over a variety of allegations about expense reports related to a sexual harassment inquiry. The board found no evidence to support the sexual harassment claim.

In the wake of that scandal, HP appointed Apotheker to take over for Hurd.

It has been a bumpy ride, as HP’s stock has plummeted almost 43 percent in a year’s time. By comparison, rival Oracle’s shares are up more than three percent in the same period, and Apple stock has risen more than 50 percent.

That share decline, given a series of major moves and just as many gaffes, has put Apotheker — who has been trying to reposition HP largely as an enterprise company — in the hot seat.

An HP spokeswoman declined to comment. I have several calls in to reach Whitman and have not yet heard back.

More to come, obviously. But, until there is more news, here is the video of the full interview with Apotheker at the ninth D: All Things Digital conference this summer.

At D9, the former SAP chief declared that he would not ship the now-doomed TouchPad until it was perfect. Ooops!

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110921/former-ebay-ceo-meg-whitman-being-considered-for-hp-ceo-job-to-replace-apotheker/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110921/oracle-shares-taking-off-after-a-strong-quarter/ http://allthingsd.com/20110921/oracle-shares-taking-off-after-a-strong-quarter/#comments Wed, 21 Sep 2011 13:45:32 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=122925 Shares in the software giant Oracle rose this morning, after a quarterly earnings report yesterday that displayed its resilience amid a sputtering economy that has caused persistent worries that companies might slash their spending on technology.

At least when it comes to Oracle software, they’re not cutting back at all, says Brian Schwartz of ThinkEquity research, in a note to clients out today. Sales of application licenses at Oracle saw their fastest growth rate during an Oracle Q1 since before the recession, making for a “sign of healthy Enterprise IT demand,” Schwartz wrote.

Overall, Oracle beat the consensus view of analysts on several metrics, including revenue ($8.4 billion, or $50 million ahead of the street) and per-share earnings (48 cents a share, two cents above consensus). On top of that, Oracle issued guidance that license revenue would continue to grow at a rate of six to 16 percent, which was also above consensus. Also: Free cash flow grew 42 percent to $5.3 billion in the quarter, a big improvement over the year-ago quarter when Oracle’s free cash flow was flat.

All good news, right? Not quite, Schwartz writes. Oracle’s hardware business is still on the comeback trail. Hardware systems product revenue declined five percent year over year, because of a shift toward higher-margin products and away from higher-volume, less profitable ones. Oracle’s plan is to essentially phase out the higher-volume servers that came with its Sun Microsystems acquisition from last year. The plan is to focus on higher-end hardware that commands a higher profit margin at sale and to phase out the less-profitable stuff. As CEO Larry Ellison said during a conference call with analysts last night: “I don’t care if our commodity x86 business goes to zero,” he said. “We don’t make any money selling those things. We have no interest in selling other people’s [intellectual property]. … We have interest in selling systems that include our IP.” By systems with “other people’s IP,” he’s referring to mainstream servers that use chips from Intel — hence the reference to x86, Intel’s DNA — and operating systems from Microsoft.

The end result, Schwartz says, is that hardware sales came in $200 million short of the consensus expectation, while the profitability of hardware sales was, at 54 percent, much better than a year ago. Clearly it’s taking awhile to turn the battleship. Oracle said that unit sales of Exadata and Exalogic hardware almost tripled; the company added 100 new customers and promised to triple the number of deployments yet again in 2012.

All that leads Schwartz to rate Oracle a Buy, with a price target of $36. As of this morning, the shares were already headed in that direction: Oracle rose by more than $2 a share — or more than seven percent, to $30.38 a share — after about a half hour of trading.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110921/oracle-shares-taking-off-after-a-strong-quarter/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110920/oracles-profit-rises-36-percent-on-strong-sales/ http://allthingsd.com/20110920/oracles-profit-rises-36-percent-on-strong-sales/#comments Tue, 20 Sep 2011 20:38:59 +0000 John Kell http://allthingsd.com/?p=122632 Oracle Corp.’s fiscal first-quarter profit jumped 36 percent as the business-software giant’s traditional software and services offerings saw strong demand, although hardware systems sales declined.

Oracle has reported strong bottom-line growth for several quarters, as the top line benefited from the $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems in early 2010 and increased revenue from new licenses and services. But declining sales of Oracle’s hardware products in the fourth quarter raised questions about its decision to expand beyond its traditional software business.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110920/oracles-profit-rises-36-percent-on-strong-sales/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110822/is-innovation-at-hp-dead/ http://allthingsd.com/20110822/is-innovation-at-hp-dead/#comments Mon, 22 Aug 2011 22:30:14 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=112695 Hewlett-Packard CEO Léo Apotheker once said he hoped that “one day people will say ‘this is as cool as HP,’ not ‘as cool as Apple.’” But now that the company has abandoned its webOS hardware business and begun “exploring strategic alternatives” for its PC business, that day will never come.

Not that it would have ever come, anyway. Because HP is no longer the innovator it once was. In fact, some would argue that innovation at HP is dying — if it’s not dead already.

“The market worries about the precise fate of HP’s PC business,” says Christopher Marlett, CEO of boutique investment bank MDB Capital, which specializes in intellectual property. “But the real story with HP is that it’s no longer an innovative company.”

According to Marlett, innovation at HP has been in decline for years now, gutted by leadership that tried to bolster profits by cutting R&D. According to some reports HP’s research and development budget used to be 9 percent of revenue. These days it’s more like 2 percent. So much for those “7 Immutable Laws of Innovation” …

“Look at the number of patent applications that HP has filed in the past five years,” he says. “The company has really just fallen off the cliff as far as innovation is concerned. And it cannot afford to do that. It has to innovate, because you can’t buy your way to relevance in this industry.”

HP certainly couldn’t. As Apotheker said last week the ramp-up on the webOS hardware business it acquired from Palm was far too long and the hundreds of millions of dollars in losses it was generating was a real drag on the company.

“HP’s hardware business is eroding; the brand is losing relevancy,” says Marlett. “Frankly, HP should probably shoot its hardware division in the head and bury it … or sell it to Dell.”

In other words, it’s no longer “HP Invent,” it’s “HP Divest.” HP’s hallowed culture of innovation is a skeleton of what it once was.

Thank God for the printer business, right?

Maybe. Marlett worries about that as well.

“The printer business is eroding too,” he insists. “Not only is there competition, but HP can’t maintain the same margins on ink cartridges that it has in the past. Then there’s new technology being developed that will revolutionize the entire printer space. But again HP hasn’t been innovating, so they’ve really got nothing in the pipeline. Don’t get me wrong, the printing business is a good business to focus on, but HP needs to work hard to protect that franchise. Really, it’s desperation time for them. They’ve got to begin innovating, because they’ll never acquire their way to shareholder value.”

That’s a bleak assessment of a once great technology icon and one that Marlett says is a good lesson for the industry. “The lack of a robust product pipeline, the acquisition spree that they are trying to rationalize — this is what happens when innovation stops. This is the big story.”

Perhaps. Or perhaps it’s just a bad chapter in a longer one.

Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg maintains that all is not lost on the HP innovation front and that in the end, things may not be quite as bleak as they seem.

“There’s been a lot of consumer innovation at HP, driving forward initiatives such as touch on Windows 7, working on new categories such as living room PCs and services such as mobile printing,” Gartenberg observes. That said, he concedes that there is uncertainty around HP’s strategy going forward. “As HP transitions, it does raise questions about what their role will be in the growing consumer technology marketplace.”

[Image credit: Chart courtesy MDB Capital]

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