Today’s topics include Apple’s first sales decline in 13 years, AT&T’s report of a sales shift from consumer smartphone users to business mobile users, Microsoft and partners announce new Windows 10-powered IoT devices and Google is allowing software vendors to try Google Apps for free through the end of the year.
Apple’s string of 13 years of quarterly revenue reports without a decline came to an end April 26 as the company reported second-quarter 2016 revenue of $50.6 billion.
That number is 13 percent lower than the $58 billion the company posted a year ago. Net income was also down in Q2 to $10.5 billion from $13.6 billion a year ago as sales of the company’s flagship iPhone smartphones leveled off.
Apple also missed analysts’ revenue estimates as it reported $50.6 billion in sales, below the $51.97 billion average estimate of 34 financial analysts who were surveyed by Thomson Reuters in advance of the earnings report.
AT&T lost 4,000 mobile postpaid net customers in the first quarter of 2016, instead of adding to that profitable category of customers as it has in most past quarters, but it still saw a 24 percent revenue gain, largely due to its acquisition last year of DirecTV.
However, AT&T also reported 75.8 million mobile business connections, which are up from the 66.9 million logged in the same period last year.
The company brought in revenue of $40.5 billion, up from $32.6 billion one year ago before it acquired DirecTV in July of 2015, and posted a net income of $3.8 billion, which is down slightly from the $3.3 billion it earned in the same quarter last year.
At the Hannover Messe industrial technology conference in Germany this week, Microsoft and partner companies are demonstrating how Windows 10 can help enable IoT-enabled business processes for factories, equipment makers and suppliers.
Along with the company’s new cloud-based Azure IoT device management capabilities and the Azure IoT Gateway SDK, which were also announced the week of April 25, Microsoft enlisted some technology partners, including Dell, to introduce Windows-based devices for connected enterprises.
Dell’s contribution is the new Dell Edge Gateway 5100 running Windows 10 IoT Enterprise. Billed as Dell’s “most industrial IoT device,” the hardware provides built-in data capture and edge analytics capabilities in an enclosure that can resist the hard knocks that come from running on factory floors and other industrial environments.
Google has extended an incentive program it has in place for businesses that currently might have contracts with other cloud vendors to switch to Google Apps cloud productivity suite for free.
Google launched the incentive program last October in a bid to get more organizations to try Google Apps. Since then, more than 200,000 users have “gone Google,” according to Neil Delaney, the company’s director for global inside sales/midmarket.
Google has seen tremendous interest in the program from smaller and midsize organizations, he said. As a result, Google has decided to extend the global program through the end of 2016.