Storage vendors haven’t been able to completely escape the perfect financial storm threatening the global economy, according to a pair of surveys by financial analysts.
Kaushik Roy of Pacific Growth Equities and Jayson Noland and Joel Inman of R.W. Baird have released their quarterly IT industry overviews, and both surveys found signs of slowing in the third quarter and considerable uncertainty heading into the fourth quarter.
“Management teams are struggling to figure out the impact of the sudden macro slowdown on their businesses,”
“Our sense is that when the financial markets stabilize, investors are likely to be interested in stocks of the companies which have a strong competitive position and are executing well,”
One positive note is that Brocade was able to raise $1.1 billion in a tough credit market for its proposed acquisition of Foundry—but that’s $400 million short of what the company needs. Still,
IT demand in
VARs See Weakness
Noland and Inman surveyed 56 enterprise resellers with total annual global sales of $9.3 billion and found that 41% of respondents were below plan in the third quarter, 41% were on plan, and 18% were above plan.
“VAR feedback for the quarter is about as negative as we have seen in years, with more resellers below plan than above plan for the quarter,” they wrote, adding that the fourth quarter is expected to be no better. Still, storage remains the strongest area of IT spending, they said, while PCs and servers are expected to be weak.
“Resellers describe storage as less discretionary, while delaying/cutting servers and PCs is relatively easy,” they wrote.
NetApp, VMware and Data Domain scored well in their survey, while
EMC was viewed as the leader in Fibre Channel, while NTAP and Dell’s EqualLogic unit were the top vendors in NAS and iSCSI, respectively.
This article appears courtesy of Enterprise Storage Forum.