EMC Corp is so concerned that it will be undeservedly tarred with the Y2K brush, or made to climb what Sun Microsystems Inc calls Heartbreak Hill, that it spent the beginning of its first quarter earnings call restating Gartner Group and Meta Group market research data that Y2K will have no impact on storage purchases this year. EMC reported first quarter net income up 51% at $220.67m compared with $146.11m on revenue up 36% at $1.12bn over $828.41m. Earnings per share were $0.41, a penny ahead of analysts’ expectations. US revenue was $720m, up 47%; Europe and Africa was $340m, up 30%; while Asia Pacific was $68m, down $9m on the year ago period. Enterprise system sales were up by 23% or $162m to $861m.

EMC says its key opportunities are Fibre Channel, NT, enterprise software and the internet. It claims to have done $25m revenue on new internet products introduced 30 days ago. Software sales are growing faster than it had planned for, rising 136% in the first quarter to $155m. It claims 65% of subsystems are now shipping with its software up from 40% a year ago. Revenue from OEM sales to Hewlett-Packard Co were $148m (14% of revenue) or slightly less than in the fourth quarter due to different marketing practices. Revenue from other OEM deals was up 40%. Services and rental revenue was $72m. It shipped some 2,000 systems in the quarter. 260 small systems with up to 1.2Tb capacity; 1,040 systems with up to 3.5Tb; and 680 systems with up to 9.3Tb.

As far as the outlook goes, EMC expects the second quarter to be better than the first;, the third quarter to be in line with the second; and the fourth quarter to be its strongest. EMC says revenue from Fibre Channel-attached systems was nearly $280m in the quarter, double the year-ago level. It claims to have shipped more than $1.1bn Symmetrix systems with Fibre Channel connectivity since it began shipping in late 1997. It says it has sold only a handful of the older Connectix subsystems. As far as the competitive landscape is concerned EMC says that as soon as Sun users begin to scale their servers up that they drop Sun’s own storage in favor of EMC kit. We could do with some lead- swapping, suggested EMC president and CEO Michael Ruettgers. รก