The first is located in Makuhari, Japan, and will be devoted to IBM’s SmartCloud Enterprise service. This is the cloud service that IBM announced in April, and which is aimed at big enterprises that delivers a mix of public and private services. I talked with Ric Telford, VP for cloud services, about SmartCloud the day after it launched.

It’s the sixth data center for IBM’s SmartCloud. In March, it said it would spend $38 million to build a data center in Singapore. Others are in Germany, Canada, and the United States. For its part, Amazon switched on a data center in Japan in March, though at last count it had five data centers around the world. (Anyway, who’s counting?)

IBM also announced that later this year it will open a second new data center in Japan, this one devoted to LotusLive, its online messaging, social collaboration and meetings software, which is a rival of sorts to Microsoft’s Exchange and Office 365 as well as Google Apps. Among other things it will offer services to Japanese companies who for legal or other reasons aren’t allowed to host their data outside the country. One big client, I’m told, is the electronics company Panasonic.

It turns out worldwide spending on IT by companies is proving surprisingly resilient given the circumstances, according to a new forecast by the market research firm Gartner. The firm expects overall tech spending to grow by 7.1 percent this year, representing an upward revision from a previous forecast of 5.6 percent.

In dollar terms that works out to a total forecast of $3.6 trillion. Of that, Gartner expects $419 billion to be spent on computing hardware, $268 billion on enterprise software, $846 billion on IT services, and $2.1 trillion on telecommunications. (It’s fun to type the word “trillion” and not be referring to federal spending.)

“It is a bit surprising that we have not seen a more significant impact on our global IT spending forecast as a result of the Japan earthquake and tsunami, but despite widespread concerns about disruptions to the supply of critical components in the initial aftermath of the natural disaster, there has not been a dramatic impact on overall IT spending,” Gartner’s vice president for research Richard Gordon said in a statement.

Spending on cloud services is a big factor in the forecast. Gartner says cloud-related spending is growing four times faster than IT spending, and will reach $89 billion this year. However, it’s informative to note that despite that intense growth, cloud spending amounts to less than three percent of the overall IT spend.

Even so, cloud category punches above its weight in importance. Gartner says that software-as-service applications — Salesforce.com is a classic example — account for about $10 billion, or about 10 percent of spending on enterprise software. More from Gartner here.

In a statement, the company said it now expects sales for the quarter ended May 28 to be in the range of $1.30 to $1.37 per share, down from the $1.47 to $1.55 per-share earnings forecast it issued just a month ago.

“This shortfall is primarily due to shipment volumes of BlackBerry smartphones that are now expected to be at the lower end of the range of 13.5-14.5 million forecasted in March and a shift in the expected mix of devices shipped towards handsets with lower average selling prices,” RIM said.

It did say that it expected shipments of its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet to be in line with what it had expected and that it has “not experienced any significant supply disruptions…due to the impact of the Japan earthquake.”

The company also said it expects to achieve full-year fully diluted earnings per share of approximately $7.50, reflecting “anticipated strong revenue growth in the third and fourth quarters of the fiscal year driven primarily by the launches of new BlackBerry smartphone products and prudent cost management.”

After a brief halt for the news, RIM shares fell $5.50 or more than 9% to $51.09 in after-hours trading.

The company said it will hold a conference call later on Thursday.

“Following a solid first quarter, we expect a more challenging second quarter,” Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said in a statement. “However, we are encouraged by our roadmap of mobile phones and Symbian smartphones, which we will ship through the balance of the year. We are fully focused on delivering the needed accountability, speed and results to positively drive our future financial performance.”

As for the numbers, Nokia said it saw sales for the quarter of 10.4 billion euros, up 9 percent from a year ago and down 18 percent from the fourth quarter. Its key devices and sales unit posted revenue of 7.1 billion euros, but the company sees that figure dropping in the current quarter to somewhere between 6.1 billion and 6.6 billion euros.

Nokia cited a number of reasons for the expected sales drop including overall competition and the impact of the Japan earthquake on component supply, as well as Nokia’s lack of phones that support more than one SIM card. The Japan quake effects should stretch into the third quarter, and Nokia said its devices business should be about the same in the third quarter as it is for the second quarter.

In addition to releasing results, Nokia announced earlier on Thursday that it has finalized its pact with Microsoft with regards to Windows Phone. In an exclusive interview, Microsoft mobile unit president Andy Lees and Nokia Executive VP Kai Oistamo talked about the pact as well as the technical progress, including the fact that Nokia now has prototype versions of its hardware running the next iteration of Windows Phone software.

“We’ve gotten to where we have gotten to faster than we thought,” Lees said. “Now we know who is exactly writing each piece of code.”

In the company’s earnings release, Elop echoed that sentiment.

“In the first quarter, we shifted from defining our strategy to executing our strategy,” he said.

In the meantime, however, Nokia has seen its share of the smartphone market continue to decline as the company cedes share to rivals, including Apple’s iPhone and devices running Google’s Android operating system. The company estimates its share of the global smartphone market last quarter was 26 percent, down from 31 percent in the prior quarter and 41 percent a year earlier. Nokia also sold more lower-end smartphones in the quarter, resulting in a 6 percent drop in average smartphone selling prices from the prior quarter.

The company hopes to shave 1 billion euros in expenses in the current year as it cuts operating expenses, including through layoffs. However, Nokia warned that most of its current employees–even those being cut–will be on the company’s payroll through the remainder of 2011.

Because it came late in the last quarter, the company said, the business impact on that period’s financial results was minimal.

“The impact on Q2 and beyond remains uncertain,” Bill Glasier, the company’s chief financial officer, said on a conference call following the company’s earnings report.

Among the components most affected by the quake were camera modules, batteries and displays, Sony Ericsson said. The company said it is working with suppliers to move to areas not impacted by the quake and, where necessary, to add secondary component suppliers.

Sony Ericsson has been working to boost its share of the global phone market by focusing on Android-based smartphones, but said that sales growth could be hampered by the quake.

The company has about 11 percent of the total Android market globally, but has a very small share in North America–a key smartphone market. Further growth depends on improving its fortunes here, CEO Bert Nordberg reiterated on the conference call. At the same time, Nordberg said that rebuilding the U.S. position must be done step by step with committed carriers as opposed to building a bunch of devices and hoping they will sell.

Verizon is due to launch the company’s Xperia Play–the so-called PlayStation Phone–sometime this spring. Sony Ericsson didn’t give any further details on the timing.

“Towards the end of the quarter we introduced the highly anticipated Xperia arc and Xperia Play, which have been well received by both operators and consumers around the world,” CEO Bert Nordberg said in a statement. “However, the Japan earthquake made it a challenging quarter operationally and we are experiencing some disruptions to our supply chain. We will continue to evaluate the situation.”

Investors have been eyeing the report not just to size up the cell phone industry, but also to get a sense of the impact on the electronics industry from the devastating earthquake that struck Japan last month.

Sales for the quarter ended March 31 were down compared to both the prior quarter and year-ago figures. Sony Ericsson said sales totaled 1.145 billion Euros ($1.63 billion), off 19 percent from a year ago and 25 percent from the prior quarter. Profit margins did grow, reaching 33 percent in the quarter, up 2 percentage points from a year ago and 3 percentage points from the prior quarter.

Sony Ericsson has been shipping fewer phones, but it is aiming to improve its bottom line by shifting to Android over a prior lineup that included far more lower-end feature phones. The company shipped 8.1 million phones in the quarter, down 28 percent from the prior quarter and 23 percent from the same quarter a year ago. The average selling price per unit, however, rose about 5 percent from a year earlier and 4 percent from the prior quarter, to 141 Euros ($200).

The company estimates it has about 5 percent of the global phone market, as measured by units, and about 3 percent when measured by dollar value.

In a repeat of a trend seen last quarter, both firms report that the market shrank in the first quarter of the year. This would constitute the first market contraction in six quarters, and the first since the onset of the recession. They differ, however, on the size of that contraction: IDC pegs it at 3.2 percent since the first quarter of 2010; Gartner at 1.1 percent.

To be fair, let’s remember that the first quarter of the year is always seasonably slow for PC purchases because two things tend to happen in the fourth quarter: Consumers splurge on gifts for family and frankly for themselves too, and take advantage of crazy deals offered by retailers desperate to clear out their inventory. On the business side, some CIOs take the opportunity to use up unspent funds in their budgets, and get employees starting off the new year with a fresh new machine at their desks. However, this tendency is just as often offset by the start of a new budget year. Whichever way you slice it, the first quarter is always weak on consumer sales though a bit stronger on the enterprise side.

So what happened? The iPad 2, for one thing. “With the launch of the iPad 2 in February, more consumers either switched to buying an alternative device, or simply held back from buying PCs,” is how Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, put it. “We’re investigating whether this trend is likely to have a long-term effect on the PC market.” Ya think?

Bob O’Donnell, IDC’s vice president for Clients and Displays, wasn’t quite as willing to blame the iPad: “Slower than expected commercial growth in the first quarter failed to offset the ongoing challenges in the consumer market,” he said in a statement. “While it’s tempting to blame the decline completely on the growth of media tablets, we believe other factors, including extended PC lifetimes and the lack of compelling new PC experiences, played equally significant roles.”

Jay Chou, another IDC analyst put it much more succinctly: “‘Good-enough computing’ has become a firm reality.”

The picture gets no better when you look at regional results. IDC says shipments declined in the U.S. by 10 percent. Gartner pegged it at 6 percent. It was, Gartner noted, the third consecutive quarter for year-on-year declines in U.S. notebook sales. Shipments in Europe contracted too, and Japan, which was already expected to be a weak market this quarter, has other things on its mind since the devastating earthquake and tsunami. Asia was the only bright spot, where shipments increased by 5.6 percent in IDC’s forecast and 4.1 percent in Gartner’s. China, IDC noted, failed to reach double-digit growth, and consumers in India, Gartner says, were distracted by the Cricket World Cup. Okay, then.

So how do the numbers look? Since IDC’s forecast is the most dire, I’ll start there:

The worldwide demand for PCs was 80.6 million units. Hewlett-Packard sold 15.2 million; Dell, which just made it back to second place, shipped 10.3 million; Acer 9 million; Lenovo 8.2 million; Toshiba 4.8 million; while “others” clocked 33 million. All vendors except for Lenovo saw declines. The worst decline was Acer’s, whose shipments fell nearly 16 percent. (Now we know why its CEO Gianfranco Lanci lost his job.) Lenovo, on the other hand, saw its shipments improve by more than 16 percent.

Demand in the U.S. was 16.1 million. HP led with 4.3 million, Dell 3.7 million, Toshiba 1.6 million, Apple 1.4 million and Acer 1.3 million. Unnamed others sold 3.7 million. Acer saw its shipments fall by an alarming 42 percent. Apple and Toshiba posted gains of 9.6 and 10.4 percent respectively. HP and Dell both saw declines.

Now let’s look at Gartner’s numbers (remember that each firm tracks the market a little differently):

Gartner pegged the worldwide market at 84.2 million units. It says HP sold 14.8 million, Acer 10.9 million, Dell 10 million, Lenovo 8.2 million, Toshiba 4.8 million. (Clearly there’s a difference in how they see Acer and Lenovo’s performances.)

In the U.S., Gartner estimated the market at 16.1 million units. By its reckoning, HP sold 4.2 million, Dell 3.6 million, Acer 1.8 million, Toshiba 1.7 million, Apple 1.5 million, others 3.3 million.

As usual, the idea behind the teardown is not only to figure out who Nintendo’s component suppliers are and what parts are being used, but to estimate how much all the components cost to help guess how much of a profit margin Nintendo is making on each unit. And it looks like a decent margin. ISuppli says the cost of all the parts in the device itself plus what’s in the box amount to $103.25 for a device that’s selling at retail for $249. The cost works out to an increase of about $25 over the Nintendo DSi, the most recent Nintendo handheld, released in 2009, which cost about $78, when iSuppli tore it apart that year.

While most of the components come from Japan, it’s not entirely clear if the supply of any of the parts used come from areas affected by the earthquake and tsunami, says Andrew Rassweiler, an iSuppli analyst who supervised the teardown. “Many of these component should have a greater risk exposure to supply chain problems, though we don’t know about any specific disruptions at this point,” he said.

The most expensive component, as is often the case with consumer electronics, is the displays. The 3DS uses two Sharp displays that cost a combined $33.80. The headliner is the top screen 3D. It’s a 3.5-inch 800-by-240 pixel display that uses an LCD-based parallax barrier panel sandwiched to the back of the color LCD which alternates between the left and right images at a high rate of speed to produce the 3D effect. “It looks like a conventional LCD from the outside, but when you open the display you see that on one side of the glass is essentially the conventional color element, and on the other side of the glass is a monochrome element,” Rassweiler told me. “It’s a clever bit of display engineering.”

The handheld’s main chip is an applications processor. It’s a custom ARM-based chip manufactured by Sharp, that at a cost of $10.02 is only slightly more expensive than the chip in the previous Nintendo DSi. However, Nintendo has quadrupled the amount of flash memory in the 3DS versus the DSi to 16 gigabytes, and Samsung, the world’s largest manufacturer of flash, supplied it. Fujitsu supplied another type of memory known as fast-cycle RAM. Rassweiler says for this particular type of memory, Nintendo has used a type of chip that’s only made by Fujitsu, which is odd because FCRAM is widely available, and its unusual for consumer electronics manufacturers to “single source”–that is, rely upon a single supplier for an important component. The combined cost of memory on the 3DS worked out to $8.36, more than twice the cost of the memory found on the DSi.

Three chips related to the user interface cost a combined $6.81: an accelerometer from STMicroelectroncis, a gyroscope from Invensense, and an audio chip from Texas Instruments. Atheros, the Wi-Fi chipmaker that’s being acquired by Qualcomm, supplied a $5 Wi-Fi chip. TI and NEC supplied power management chips that cost $3.63. The 3DS contains three cameras, and though it’s not clear who supplied them–camera suppliers have gone to great lengths to hide their identities in recent years–iSuppli reckons their combined cost at $4.70.

Since I often get asked this question, let me say that iSuppli’s analysis focuses strictly on the materials used and doesn’t account for the cost to develop software or to license any patents. Nor does it account for the cost of any shipping or distribution or marketing. It’s just the raw cost of the hardware.

“At this point, we don’t know when we can go back to normal production,” said a Renesas spokeswoman, Makie Uehara.

Electronics and auto makers world-wide could be hurt by reduced output from Renesas, which makes key components.

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The company also raised its quarterly dividend by a penny per share, or 20 percent, making this the third year in a row it has boosted its dividend. It said it doesn’t expect significant impact on its operations in Japan following the earthquake. There had been some concerns.

Oracle said it expects profit–excluding one-time expenses–will be in the 69- to 73-cent range this quarter, beating the 66-cent average estimate of analysts. Revenue is expected to grow year-on-year in the range of 9 to 13 percent, which works out to a range of between $10.4 billion and $10.7 billion.

The results were led by sales of new software licenses, a key measure of new business as opposed to sales to existing computers, which rose 29 percent to $2.2 billion. This handily beat the company’s guidance for growth in new licenses of 10 to 20 percent.

Software license updates rose 13 percent to $3.7 billion. Hardware sales were $1 billion, but since Oracle closed on its Sun acquisition during this quarter a year ago, a year-on-year comparison doesn’t apply.

The strong earnings report comes a day after Oracle launched a quarrel with hardware rival Hewlett-Packard and chipmaker Intel by saying it would no longer develop software that runs on systems using Intel’s Itanium Processor because it expects Intel is quietly planning to kill the chip. Intel denied the claim, saying two new versions of Itanium are in the pipeline, while HP, which sells most of the systems containing the chip, said it was “shocked.” Oracle stuck to its guns, saying it was only trying to help its customers plan accordingly.

Speaking of HP, with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison serving on jury duty, it fell to President Safra Catz to deliver this quarter’s obligatory dig at HP during a conference call with analysts.

With Oracle’s hardware business showing a healthy hardware margin–which is interesting in light of the fact that the results contain the hardware assets of Sun Microsystems–Catz reiterated a prior promise to deliver a $1.5 billion profit on the Sun business by the end of this fiscal year. That makes Sun a good purchase, she said, when compared to HP’s acquisition of 3Par, though time will tell if Oracle can deliver on the promised $2 billion profit in year two.

It’s probably not a fair comparison. Sun was trading at an extremely depressed valuation when Oracle stepped in. Only months before, Sun had been trading at the value of its cash holdings. 3Par, on the other hand, saw its valuation triple as the result of a punishing bidding war between HP and Dell. However Catz isn’t the first one to say HP paid too much. But as usual, any chance to tweak HP’s nose is fair game at Oracle, as you can hear in the audio clip below.

Safracatz1 by ahess247

Japan in 2010 accounted for 35 percent–or $11 billion worth–of the $31.5 billion global market for automotive infotainment electronics, iSuppli says. On top of that, Japan is responsible for about one-third–$7.3 billion–of the $23 billion market for chips used in cars overall. Aside from chips, Japanese companies produce LCD panels and optical sensors used to make in-car systems.

ISuppli says Renesas Electronics, Texas Instruments, Freescale Semiconductor and Fujitsu, all of which supply components to the auto industry, have all been affected by shipping problems and difficulty in obtaining raw materials. The problems could last weeks or months.

Problems like this aren’t just hitting infotainment systems. As The Wall Street Journal reported today, shortages of a single electronic part made by Hitachi Automotive that measures airflow in car engines have forced companies like General Motors, Toyota and PSA Peugeot-Citroën to cut their output at auto plants in the U.S. and Europe. The plant that makes the component is located to the north of Tokyo and has been shut down. Hitachi makes about 60 percent of the world’s supply for this type of part. The Journal said Toyota on Wednesday warned employees to expect a production halt at some plants in the U.S. and Canada.

Meanwhile, Japanese automakers have stopped production at several plants in order to conserve electricity following the loss of generating power from the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. There has been a 10 percent reduction in electrical capacity, iSuppli says. Additionally, companies like BMW, Volkswagen, Continental and Bosch have removed their expatriate employees from Japan.

Separately, Dow Jones reported yesterday that ZTE Corp., a Chinese maker of networking gear, is suffering quake-related supply problems. A company exec said it expects the problems to last as long as six months.

Take for example the attention today on lithium ion batteries used in notebook PCs. Demand right now is not terribly high–it’s a time of the year when consumers are buying fewer PCs–but consider what happens if the crisis persists. As Taiwan’s Digitimes observes, a good bit of the world’s production ecosystem for lithium ion batteries used in notebooks are not only located in Japan, but many are in areas affected by the quake or within the evacuation radius of the troubled nuclear power plant there.

Sony, which makes notebook batteries, and Hitachi, which makes a key battery part called an anode, both operate plants in the disaster area, and both have been shut down for the time being, according to a research report from Pranab Kumar Sarmah at Daiwa Securities in Hong Kong. Numerous other companies that make battery parts also operate in the disaster area, and most of them are affected.

What about the iPad? I just heard from Wayne Lam, an analyst at iSuppli, the research firm that tore down the iPad 2 the other day. He tells me markings on the iPad 2′s three-cell battery pack include a label that reads “assembled in China.” However, he says that applies only to the finished battery pack. A closer look at the markings reveal a reference to “Apple Japan.” He thinks that’s sufficient proof the battery cells came from Japan. “Typically, battery cells are made at the site of assembly but since this Li-Ion Polymer battery is unusually thin, it may be the case that it requires battery cell manufacturing technologies that Japan has.”

Then there’s the LCD display market. LCD manufacturing is an extremely precise process, one that doesn’t take kindly to the power shortages and rolling blackouts caused by the loss of generating capacity at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Typically, Japan derives about a third of its power capacity from nuclear power, and this plant constituted a big portion of that. Again, it’s Sony and Hitachi plants located in areas affected by the disaster. Between them, the two companies produce 90 percent of the world’s supply of Anisotropic Conductive Film, an interconnect material that’s widely used in LCD panels.

Another key part in LCD displays–a color polarizer–is made by Fuji Film. Dale Ford, another iSuppli analyst, said earlier this week there have been indications that supplies of these have been impacted, which will drive prices up, which will in turn be reflected in the final price consumers pay for their TVs and monitors. Something tells me the lingering effects of this disaster are going to trouble the tech economy for some time to come, especially if the state of Japan’s power grid remains uncertain.