Thomas Kraemer Quotations

IBM continues to believe that it can hit consensus EPS targets. In a deteriorating environment, this undeniably represents a solid showing.

We can't make investments (in new track) based just on demand today, but how it will look 10 years from now and beyond.

Demand in Europe remains weak and the US is stable but at anemic levels. Fortune 500 purchases remain slow with little movement toward discretionary projects. Finally, the typical year end surge of Government spending began later than normal in July.

We think this is important as Sun's ability to compete in the enterprise market depends on its ability to get product out in a timely fashion.

We believe that established enterprises accelerated IT, equity investment, partnerships, and other types in spending since they feared that an unexpected and superior dot.com business model would threaten their existence. With the diminution of the dot.com threat, purchase cycles should lengthen, return on investment should matter again, and the worth of business models will have to be demonstrated.

It is hard to hear Sun's commentary and have any confidence that spending will reaccelerate or that numbers for most of the enterprise sector may not need to come down again. The demand jury is still out, and that's the key issue.

All of tech has been massacred, but our data suggests that storage may weather the storm better since its earnings stream will be more reliable than almost any other area of technology.

Although the results were solid, and we expect the stock to respond favorably in the near term, we continue to rate the shares 'neutral' due to long-term concerns over IBM's server businesses and overall IT spending. Our surveys suggest that server and IT spending could weaken throughout the year, thereby questioning IBM's ability to meet revenue expectations.