EMC remains on track to hit FY13 revenues of $23.5b, up 8% on FY12. Its Q1 performance was solid, if a little weighted to the back end of the three-month period due to on going caution from buyers. Operating margin was 23.2%, in line with last year’s first quarter.
Geographically, it is clear that EMEA is suffering more so than some of the other regions. The United States represents over half of EMC’s revenues and here is grew 8% to $2.8bn. The story is somewhat different in EMEA, which grew just 1%. The UK is EMC’s largest subsidiary outside of the US, and while we don’t yet have an update on Q1, we estimate that FY12 was a year of double-digit growth (subscribers can see more here - EMC: The big brand that's yet to go top 20).
At the beginning of April, EMC created its Pivotal business, which will be led by former VMware CEO, Paul Maritz. GE has invested $105m in the business and now owns 10%. Pivotal is a platform-as-a-service for rapid development of applications that leverage big and fast data. EMC is of course not building this from scratch and has moved staff and products across from other parts of EMC and VMware (including from Greenplum, Cloud Foundry, Spring, Cetas, Pivotal Labs and GemFire).
With the launch of Pivotal, EMC is now structured into three businesses, i.e. EMC II (storage and security) VMware (cloud and virtualisation software and services) and the newly launched Pivotal. Indeed, VMware has also just released Q1 results, with a performance that hints at a good year to come. Revenue growth was 13% and the non-GAAP operating margin was 32.5%. Revenue guidance for FY13 remains in the range of $5.12bn to $5.24bn - an increase of 11% to 14%. (This revenue guidance takes into account the removal of Pivotal revenue from Q2 onwards.)