For its first fiscal quarter ended January 31st 2006, the company has said that its storage revenues were up 4% year-on-year, but down 9% sequentially. Given that the overall storage market is growing at around mid single-digits, the 4% increase year-on-year is not a spectacularly poor performance. But it is off a base that was already low, as HP’s storage sales in it first fiscal quarter last year were themselves down 1% year-on-year.
The sequential fall looks worse. Some of it can be attributed to the fact that the previous October quarter was boosted by its inclusion of the sales-closing push at the end of HPs’ fiscal year. But for it’s latest first quarter ended 31 January, HP should have benefited from the traditionally strong enterprise sales to all vendors in November and December.
Kaushik Roy, equity analyst Kaushik Roy at the Susquehanna Financial Group said: They missed their internal storage numbers. But their pipeline looks good for the April quarter.
For its part, HP said only that it was pleased with strong growth in sales of its XP and EVA disk arrays – up 14% and 28% year-on-year, respectively, and acknowledged that its storage division still has work to do.
ESG analyst Brian Babineau argued that HP is still clawing its way back. If they weren’t, EMC would still be seeing 40% growth in Clariion sales, he said.
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