Hewlett-Packard is the leader in the clubhouse.
Calling it one of its "best quarters in a number of years" HP Chairman and CEO mark Hurd told journalists in a conference call Thursday that HP sales grew 7 percent in its fiscal fourth quarter, ended Oct. 31, to $24.6 billion, pushing revenue for its fiscal 2006 to $91.7 billion. That number should make HP officially the largest technology company in the world, passing IBM, which is expected by most analysts to report sales of just short of $90 billion for its fiscal year ending Dec. 31.
Hurd said too that HP, as part of the reorganization of its sales force last year, has hired a substantial number of new sales people and is looking for more.
"We are looking everywhere," he said. "This is part of us not just building out our direct sales force to sell direct but really in concert with our partners because we want to scale our partner relationships as a key part of our strategy. We had pretty good success in Q3 and Q4. Think of us as being more than 50 percent of what we hope to achieve," he said.
Hurd declined to give specific numbers of new hires.
HP's net earnings for its fourth quarter surged to $1.7 billion, up from the $416 million reported for the year-earlier period. Hurd said in a conference call following the earnings release that growth in both revenue and earnings was spread evenly across all of HP's business units. "This was one of the most balanced quarters in recent memory," he said.
Personal Systems Group (PSG) revenue grew 10 percent year-over-year to $7.8 billion with shipments up 16 percent. PSG operating profit reached $336 million compared to $200 million during HP's 2005 fourth quarter.
Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) revenue grew 7 percent to $7.3 billion with overall printing shipments up 17 percent led by 40 percent growth in color laser printers and 160 percent growth in multifunction printers, Hurd said. Operating profit for the unit was $1.1 billion, up from $896 million a year earlier.
Enterprise Storage and Servers (ESS) revenue grew 4 percent to $4.7 billion led by a 38 percent jump in blade server sales. Geoffrey Lilien, CEO of Lilien Systems, an HP solution provider in Larkspur, Calif., said consolidation and virtualization are driving blade sales. "Blades are huge and storage is huge," he said, adding that his overall HP business grew at a double-digit clip this past year.
Software revenue for the quarter reached $349 million, an increase of 14 percent from a year earlier. HP's OpenView led software growth with 28 percent growth from the year earlier period. Hurd promised that HP would fully integrate Mercury into the company within 90 days. HP completed the acquisition of the application management and IT governance software company on Nov. 7.
Hurd said that HP revenues for its first fiscal quarter should fall between $24.1 billion and $24.3 billion and that fiscal 2007 revenue should reach $97 billion.
|
Five Companies That Dropped The Ball This Week For the week ending Feb. 10, CRN looks at five companies that were either asleep at the wheel or just didn't make good decisions. |
|
Five Companies That Came To Win This Week For the week ending Feb. 10, CRN looks at five companies that brought their 'A' game and made moves to beat out competitors |
|
10 Challenges That HP Wants Partners To Tackle Right Now CRN speaks with HP's business unit chiefs to get a sense of where they'd like partners to focus in the coming year, as well as how CEO Meg Whitman is making a difference. |
 More
Slide Shows |
