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Big blues
April 15, 2005
It's always dangerous to draw broad conclusions from any one company's quarterly earnings report, but the sluggish sales reported yesterday evening by both IBM and Sun don't bode well for the long-rumored tech recovery. IBM's quarterly revenues edged up just 3 percent over last year's numbers, to $22.9 billion, well below analysts' expectations of $23.6 billion. Sun's sales fell to $2.625 billion from the year-earlier $2.651 billion, also missing Wall Street's forecast. These disappointments are the latest evidence that large swathes of the enterprise computing market, extending over hardware, software and even services, are acting more like mature commodity industries than like the high-growth go-go markets of earlier years. But there seems to be something deeper going on as well. Big companies are growing ever more wary about tying up their capital in expensive new systems or even upgrades of older systems. They want their computing operations to be much leaner, with lower fixed costs and greater flexibility. In the long run, that should mean a steady shift away from buying and maintaining individual IT components and toward renting basic IT functions from outside suppliers - a trend that could ultimately be very good news for companies like IBM and Sun that are out in front in promoting "on-demand" computing. In the short run, though, it probably means that companies will simply try to milk their current assets for all they're worth. The old era is passing away, but the new one hasn't quite arrived yet.
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The end of corporate computing
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