Dan Warmenhoven, chief executive of Network Appliance, was skeptical about calling a recovery in technology spending when he lowered the company's forecast on April 11 for the fiscal fourth quarter which finished last month and which the firm reports on Tuesday.
Network Appliance, which makes stand-alone data storage that hooks into computer networks, said revenue would fall 20-25 percent from the previous quarter's $288.4 million, leaving operating earnings of 1-3 cents per diluted share, instead of the 10 cent Wall Street consensus reported by Thomson Financial/First Call research at the time.
But Debra McNeill, a portfolio manager at Fremont Investment Advisors, said she was concerned storage heavyweight EMC Corp. (EMC), facing price pressure at the high end from Hitachi Data Systems, could be turning up the heat at its low end against Network Appliance, the only one of the four hardware companies reporting that McNeill does not own.
``EMC is really getting horribly squeezed from Hitachi. So Network Appliance is the easy tail to step on. Their forward look is not going to be pretty,'' she said. Thus far Network Appliance has blamed the economy alone for its troubles.
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