NetApp Reports Strong Financials

Storage provider NetApp on May 21 reported financial results and overall growth for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2008 that out-performed the rest of the sector in general.

NetApp's revenues for the fourth fiscal quarter were $938 million, an increase of 17 percent compared with revenues of $801 million for the same period a year ago and an increase of 6 percent compared with $884 million in the prior quarter.

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Revenues for fiscal year 2008 totaled $3.3 billion, an increase of 18 percent compared with revenues of $2.8 billion for the previous fiscal year, the company reported.

Perhaps most importantly, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company reported a 23 percent increase in sales of its storage systems, which indicates that it is taking market share away from larger competitors such as EMC, IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

According to researcher IDC's most recent quarterly disk storage market report, the world disk storage market grew about 5 percent in 2007. NetApp owns about 7.5 percent of the world market.

"Our mission is to continue to help customers transform their data center architectures through higher efficiencies and asset utilization, greater power, space savings, and innovative data center design and data management techniques," NetApp Chairman and CEO Dan Warmenhoven told analysts, journalists and investors in a conference call.

NetApp, generally considered fourth overall in the data storage market behind EMC, IBM and HP, continued to gain momentum in the storage software market, growing the most among the top five leading storage software providers in 2007.

According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker Q4 2007, NetApp grew more than three times faster than the storage software market in 2007 and gained share in each market segment in which it provides offerings.

During the last quarter, NetApp unveiled a new brand identity and changed the official name of the company from Network Appliance to NetApp.

This past quarter, NetApp was recognized for its green initiatives with three awards for its innovative data center design and its advanced data management techniques to reduce power consumption, a company spokesperson said.