Posted 11/06/09 at 10:57:53 AM by Paul Lilly

Around this time last year, the topic of Nvidia included faulty GPUs, which ultimately ended up costing the firm millions of dollars, and stiff competition from a suddenly revitalized ATI. Now it's all about Nvidia's upcoming Fermi graphics and revenue gains.

Ending the third quarter on a positive note, Nvidia reported revenue of $903.2 million. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said that marks an increase of 16 percent over the previous quarter, and is slightly up from this same time last year when the graphics chip maker posted revenue of $897.7 million.

"We continued to make progress in the third quarter with healthy market demand across the board," said Jen-Hsun. "Revenue was up from a year ago, with improvement in each of our PC, professional solutions, and consumer businesses. It's great to see us shipping orders with our Tegra mobile-computing solution, and growing enthusiasm for our Tesla platform for parallel computing in the server and cloud-computing markets."

 Nvidia CFO David White added that the company's GPU business was up almost 25 percent sequentially.

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Posted 11/05/09 at 07:57:09 AM by Paul Lilly

Maybe the economy is recoverying after all, or so analysts are saying after Cisco reported fiscal first-quarter earnings that nudged ahead of expectations and showed strong sequential growth.

The network security firm reported a quarterly profit of $1.8 billion, or 36 cents a share. That's down from last year, when Cisco posted a profit of $2.2 billion, or 42 cents a share, but up from last quarter. Revenue for the first fiscal quarter climbed to $9 billion, which is more than the $8.75 billion analysts had expected.

"Our ability to launch four proposed acquisitions, the ecosystem-shifting coalition with EMC/VMware, and five new products and industry solutions into the Cisco pipeline in the past few months alone underscore this momentum," said John Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco. "Our build – buy - partner innovation engine is clearly running on all cylinders, while our operational machine is pulling costs out of the business even as we scale new models for growth. Execution and results over time will demonstrate the long-term impact of this vision and strategy— but a new model of productivity based on collaboration is clearly emerging and we believe this may be the most profound opportunity for businesses in our 25 years as a company."

Cisco has been on a spending spree as of late, having recently agreed to purchase Starent Networks for a cool $2.9 billion and ScanSafe for $183 million.

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Posted 10/28/09 at 02:04:11 PM by Paul Lilly

SAP, the multinational software development and consulting firm headquartered in Germany, reported a bigger-than-expected drop in third quarter revenue in its earnings announcement today.

Somewhat offsetting the disappointing performance were lower tax rates and better profit margins, both of which led to a 12 percent rise in net income. But this came as little consolation to investors, as SAP also reported a 31 percent decline in software revenue. SAP adjusted its sales forecast for 2009 and now expects revenue to drop anywhere from 6 to 8 percent.

SAP also caught fire from Oracle last month after Oracle reported weaker-than-expected sales of new software licenses, which Oracle blamed on SAP's weakness as a reseller of its products.

Putting a positive spin on the sobering numbers, SAP chief executive Leo Apotheker pointed out gains in his company's volume business and multi-year agreements.

"Despite the continued tough spending environment, we are pleased to see further progress in the evolution of our volume business as a result of smaller deals," Apotheker said. "In addition, we are driving more multi-year agreements, where customers buy and consume software over many periods, which we believe is a positive transition for both SAP and our customers."

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Posted 10/23/09 at 03:06:02 PM by Paul Lilly

Recession? Tech slump? Losses? Apparently these are all things Western Digital is not familiar with, even if just about everyone else in the tech industry is. The hard drive maker today reported record quarterly revenue of $2.2 billion, and that's not the only record that was set.

Hard drive shipments also hit a record high totaling 44.1 million units for the quarter. All tallied, Western Digital pulled in net income of $288 million, or $1.25 per share, for its first fiscal quarter ended October 2, 2009.

"For the second consecutive quarter, demand for hard drives was stronger than expected as the positive industry conditions that materialized in the June quarter continued throughout the September quarter," said John Coyne, president and chief executive office. "We believe that demand is being driven primarily by consumers as a result of the growing social media phenomenon. This is creating demand in mobile and desktop PCs, branded products, and enterprise storage."

Western Digital went on to say that its hard drive inventories remain at historically low levels. And going forward, the hard drive maker says demand remains strong, so the good times should continue.

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Posted 10/23/09 at 09:31:59 AM by Paul Lilly

Microsoft today announced revenue of just $12.95 billion for the first quarter ended September 30, 2009, and while smaller companies would love to switch places with the software giant, the numbers represent a 14 percent decline for Microsoft from the same period one year ago.

Putting a positive spin on its first quarter results, Microsoft said the numbers reflect the deferral of $1.47 billion of revenue related to the Windows 7 Upgrade Option program and presales of the just-released OS to OEMs and retailers before it officially launched. If you were to add the deferred revenue back into the equation, the year-on-year decline would only be 4 percent, Microsoft noted.

"We are very pleased with our performance this quarter and particularly by the strong consumer demand for Windows," said Chris Liddell, chief financial officer at Microsoft. "We also maintained our cost discipline, which allowed us to drive strong earnings performance despite continued tough overall economic conditions."

Microsoft also noted that it is reducing its operating expense guidance to $26.2 billion to $26.5 billion for the full year ending June 30, 2010.

Liddell will discuss the results in more detail later today during a webcast, which will be available for replay until the end of the business day.

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Posted 10/20/09 at 05:52:21 PM by Jason Barry

Yahoo was able to report positive numbers to the tune of $186m so far this year compared to the disappointing $54m they reported this time last year. While those numbers seem promising, sales fell about 12% this year with revenue down to $1.58b.

They can report these numbers because thye slashed more than 2,000 jobs during the past year, freeing some of their overhead costs. Further, they deployed some large service changes, such as welcoming the use of rivals onto its portal, and upgrading and enhancing its web search tools. They also initiated a $100m global advertising campaign for its portal and advertising services.

Most likely, Microsoft is happiest to hear this positive growth as they signed a deal in July to utilize Yahoo’s advertising sales in exchange for Microsoft’s search services. The Federal Trade Commission is still finalizing the deal.

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Posted 10/16/09 at 08:39:37 AM by Paul Lilly

IBM on Thursday posted its third quarter results, and for the most part, it was all good news for Big Blue. Compared to last year, the company posted better numbers pretty much across the board.

IBM report third quarter diluted earnings of $2.40 per share, up 18 percent over last year's earnings of $2.04 per share. Net income also shot up by double-digit percentage points and settled at $3.2 billion, up from $2.8 billion last year, which is a 14 percent gain.

"We continued to invest for growth in areas where clients see potential for value creation including Smarter Planet solutions, cloud computing, and advanced business analytics," the company said in a statement. "We are optimistic about 2009 as we again raise our full-expectations and we remain well had of pace for our 2010 roadmap of $10 to $11 per share."

By the end of the year, IBM said it now expects full-year earnings to hit $9.85 per share compared with its previous expectation of at least $9.70 per share.

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Posted 10/15/09 at 08:25:58 PM by Paul Lilly

Earlier this week Intel reported better than expected numbers and said it was confident about the future ahead, which seems to be the theme for the quarter. No. 2 chip maker AMD said today that it lost money in the third quarter -- $128 million to be exact , or 18 cents per share -- which is less than the $134 million the company lost one year ago.

AMD's revenue took a backward slide to the tune of 22 percent, settling in at $1.4 billion. The silver lining is that analysts had expected AMD's loss to be in the neighborhood of 30 percent, so by that token, AMD is actually doing pretty well when graded on a curve.

Like every other company in the tech industry, AMD took a hit to its bottom line because of weak computer sales in the first half of the year. However, the chip maker's shipments actually rose from the previous quarter, driven in large part by strong demand for mobile processors.

It's been 8 months since AMD finalized its manufacturing spinoff deal, but a weak economy and slumping tech sector have made it difficult to discern what effect the deal has had on AMD's numbers.

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