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Strategies & Market Trends : Sharck Soup -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sharck who wrote (23876)	5/18/2001 9:40:02 PM
From: puborectalis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 37746

More good news for VRTS....... HP: Storage business booming By Reuters May 18, 2001, 4:50 p.m. PT The chief of Hewlett-Packard's storage division on Friday said sales growth of its high-end machines could top 60 percent during the second half of the year and that the company could add "hundreds" of new staff. After Hewlett-Packard reported 60 percent revenue growth from its XP storage business, Nora Denzel, the company's vice president of network storage, told Reuters she expects to maintain, and possibly top, that expansion in the second half of the year. "I think we can continue to grow at 60 percent," Denzel said. "I definitely think we can sustain the momentum." When asked if the XP business could surpass 60 percent growth, Denzel replied, "Yeah, I personally do...We're adding a lot of legs" to this business. She declined to be specific but said the storage division's hiring outlook called for hiring "hundreds" of people dedicated to selling and servicing Hewlett-Packard's products. She said the increase would be 40 percent to 60 percent over current staffing levels. During the second quarter, which ended April 30, data storage represented one of Hewlett-Packard's fastest-growing business segments. Denzel said storage has become one of the top four priorities of Hewlett-Packard Chairman Carly Fiorina. "She's taken a keen interest," Denzel said. XP revenue surged 60 percent in the second quarter. That outperformed the overall 7 percent decline in Hewlett-Packard's computing-systems segment, whose revenue shrank to $4.66 billion in the quarter, compared with $5 billion in the year-ago period. Hewlett-Packard does not break out storage revenue separately, but Denzel said it is a multibillion-dollar a year business. Hewlett-Packard's XP data-storage machine competes against the high-end machines of EMC and IBM. The machines store massive amounts of information, everything from e-mail traffic to online transactions. EMC's Symmetrix machine, for example, boasts a capacity of 70 terabytes, enough space to store 70 million copies of Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn," EMC President Joe Tucci told investors at the company's annual meeting earlier this month. EMC remains the No. 1 data-storage company, controlling 20 percent of a market that could grow to $50 billion this year. Since ending its reseller agreement with EMC in May 1999 and going with Hitachi Data Systems, Hewlett-Packard has shipped more than $1 billion in storage product (through the end of 2000), Denzel said. "I don't have any fear of not having good storage numbers this year," Denzel said.