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EMC fired on all cylinders during its fourth quarter and full year 2011 to help the company report its best financial year ever.
Key to that success was EMC's indirect sales channels which saw growth in terms of number of partners and their sales and more than made up for the loss of Dell as a reseller partner.
EMC on Tuesday reported record quarterly and yearly revenue, income, and earnings-per-share for its fourth fiscal quarter of 2011, which ended December 31.
For it fourth quarter, EMC's revenue reached $5.6 billion, up 14 percent over the $4.9 billion it reported in the fourth quarter of 2011. Income for EMC rose to $832 million, up 32 percent over last year's $629 million, with earnings per share rising 31 percent to reach 38 cents.
For the full-year 2011, EMC revenue was $20.0 billion, up 18 percent over the $17.0 billion it reported last year. Income for the year rose 30 percent to reach $2.5 billion, while earnings per share for the year increased 25 percent to reach $1.10.
For the fourth quarter, EMC's Information Storage business revenue rose 12 percent over last year. This included an 11-percent increase in EMC's high-end Symmetrix storage product revenue and a 24-percent increase in midtier storage products revenue, including revenue from its VNX, Clariion, Celerra, Centera, Data Domain, Isilon, Avamar, and Atmos hardware and software products
EMC also reported fourth quarter revenue from its VMware business grew 27 percent over last year, while its RSA Information Security business grew 16 percent during that time.
During the fourth quarter, EMC's U.S. revenue rose 16 percent over last year to reach $3.0 billion, or 54 percent of the company's total sales.
"I am please with our overall performance in Q4," said Joe Tucci, EMC chairman and CEO. "Our results were strong and our balance of execution capped a very successful 2011."
For EMC, the midmarket market and the channel were both a big part of its fourth-quarter and full-year 2011 success.
David Goulden, EMC executive vice president and CFO, said a major part of EMC's success stems from the company's transformation of its go-to-market model to embrace indirect channels to facilitate the adoption of its technologies by customers.
"By leveraging our own services organization, expanding our relationship with our existing channel partners, seeking out and incentivizing new channel partners, and capitalizing on VCE, we continue to drive customers towards the next-generation IT infrastructures that will support cloud and big data in the future," Goulden said.
EMC in 2011 signed up 1,700 new channel partners who sold EMC products for the first time, with revenue from those new partners accounting for almost half its channel revenue growth that year, he said.
EMC also signed up about 2,000 new midmarket storage customers in the fourth quarter, he said.
At the same time, VCE, the joint-venture company set up by EMC, Cisco, and VMware to sell pre-configured Vblock cloud storage infrastructures, has shown strong growth through channel partners of the three vendors, Goulden said.
"Given that converged infrastructure is a relatively new concept, and Vblocks are very new products, we are extremely pleased with the adoption rate thus far," he said. "The order rate for Vblocks in Q4 exceeded $800 million on an annualized basis, as we rapidly close in on the billion-dollar run-rate goal we highlighted last year."
Next: Success From The Channel, And A Look Forward
