Tom Kraemer Quotations

IBM has proven that the services/solution centric approach to the market can build shareholder value.

Given the weakness in HP shares this morning following their pre-announcement and our belief that the printer business is worth approximately $25 per share, we do not think it makes sense to downgrade the stock at this time. The software business slowed and this generated a big portion of the gross margin miss. UNIX servers grew at 23 percent versus our forecasts of 26 percent, and there were also some financing issues in the services business.

We think this will be an incremental boost to the overall network-attached storage market and is an incremental revenue opportunity for EMC, and therefore positive for EMC. We believe Network Appliance will face more competition from EMC, but we did not see any new major software that hugely disturbs what is occurring in this space.

We think this may be perceived as a near-term negative, as some had been looking for the new servers to be announced.

While we expected management to lower expectations for the current quarter, the magnitude of the reductions caught us by surprise.

Both HP and Compaq have been pursuing several common strategies: Becoming more services-centric, Wintel in the enterprise, storage as a technology growth engine, and moving to an overall solution sell. There will obviously be regulatory and enormous execution hurdles, but, with the addition of Compaq, HP should be better positioned to move forward on every one of these fronts.

Competition will intensify but IBM should be able to gain share as HP undergoes a Herculean integration task.

Economic softness is accelerating non-economic trends that threaten Sun and raise the likelihood that numbers may need to again be reduced.

The key growth drivers are all in place.