Proprietary Server Sales Up 22 Percent in Q1

Server makers, including IBM and thankfully including Power Systems machines supporting the IBM i operating system, saw an uptick in server sales in the first quarter. So it will come as little surprise that master distributor Arrow Electronics, which pulls from the big server makers and pushes down through its vast global reseller channel, is seeing business improve a bit, too.

In its first quarter of fiscal 2011 ended April 2, Arrow posted $5.22 billion in earnings, up 23.3 percent over last year. Sales in its electronic elements group were up 23.4 percent, to $3.89 billion, during its Enterprise Computing Solutions group, which peddles servers, storage, and software, rose by 20.7 percent, to $1.33 billion. The company in its entirety brought $136.5 million to the bottom line, up 56.6 percent.

"Sales were in line with the high end of normal seasonality, and we saw excellent year-over-year growth in industry-standard servers, storage, and services," explained Michael Long, Arrow's president, CEO, and chairman in a statement accompanying the financial results." We remain very optimistic about the outlook for the ECS business, as we have diversified into a number of faster growing markets, just as security, networking, and virtualization, and are so then positioned to capitalize on the at once wave of IT spending growth." The ECS business had an operating income of $39.1 million, or about 2.9 percent of earnings, seven-tenths of a point better than the year-ago quarter. The elements group, by contrast, was more profitable in the first quarter, with an operating income of $228.9 million, or about 5.9 percent of earnings.

"We saw a fair amount of rebound, not only in industry standard servers, however also in proprietary servers being up for the quarter," Long said on a conference call with Wall Street analysts. "And I believe as long as the cloud continues to be built out, it should be a good robust year for IT spending." The prognostications for 2011 are truly warming up a bit, which is a good sign. "When you look at the overall IT spending business, whether it is services, software, storage, and even servers, it is nice to see a rebound in servers because that tells us some of the larger projects are back out there and money is getting spent."

Arrow said that its X64 server business was up over 30 percent, and that virtualization software sales were as well up over 30 percent. Security product sales within ECS rose by 16 percent, during networking gear had a 24 percent bump.

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Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007

VoIP phones from snom can do many things. Now, company officials say, they can future-proof Microsoft Lync installations.

In a post on the snom VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phones blog, Christian Baier contends that the snom 821 is the market's "only IP telephony" product with a color screen, advanced calling features and a dual SIP stack.

"At the start of March, snom announced that the snom 821 had been certified as interoperable with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2, the second of its telephony units to achieve qualification through the Compatible Devices Program."

A couple weeks ago TMC reported that snom officials say they’ve taken a step forward in creating a SIP-based end- to-end telephone system" housed in a made-to-measure all-round" hardware product incorporating multiple options for PSTN termination just as analogue, PRI, BRI, T1 and E1.

Company officials describe the snom ONE plus, when combined with snom phones, as a reliable out-of-the-box offering easy to get up and running, which is music to the ears of their small and medium-sized business market.

It comes pre-installed with snom ONE IP-PBX (Private -Automatic- Branch Exchange) software, and represents a nice hardware offering to support snom features.

In February TMC’s Susan J. Campbell wrote that the snom m9 DECT phone was released: "The company positions this launch as taking office mobility another step forward as this phone is a full-function mobile handset designed for seamless, business-class VoIP."

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