Storage maven EMC Corp beat even the most optimistic Wall St forecast by a penny by reporting $124m net income for its fourth quarter in 1996, off revenue of $656m, or $0.50 a share. That helped propel the high-capacity storage specialist to an 18% rise in net income for the whole fiscal, to $386m, with revenues up 18% to $2.27bn from $1.92bn. EMC says the fourth quarter was the best in the company’s 17-year history. International sales were a particularly bright spot, up to 44% of total revenue for the last three months of 1996. EMC’s president and CEO Michael Reuttgers took the good news as betokening market acceptance of the company’s new open systems Symmetrix ICDA (Integrated Cached Disk Array) offering, which began shipment late in the period. Open storage, as opposed to mainframe-only products, now accounted for 150% more EMC business in the fourth quarter than in the previous year.
