EMC produced another workmanlike effort in its first quarter, hiking revenue by 14 per cent and enjoying unusually strong hardware sales.

The big daddy of storage brought in $2.55bn during the first quarter, which compares to $2.24bn reported in the same period last year. Such double-digit percentage gains in revenue have become a tradition at EMC. Much of the past success stems from EMC's growing software businesses, although the core hardware line did most of the dirty work this quarter.

EMC also posted a $273m profit during the quarter, which compares with last year's profit of $182m, when the results are normalized for EMC's stock option expenses this year.

The company's hardware business grew 20 per cent during the quarter to $1.23bn - the biggest gain in more than two years. Much of the growth came from EMC's new Symmetrix DMX-3 family of systems.

Software revenue rose 11 per cent to $925m, and services revenue grew 6 per cent to $396m.

The VMware subsidiary was once again the star of the software group with revenue rising 64 per cent to $131m. We still can't help but wonder when EMC will spinoff VMware and reward shareholders.

EMC expects second quarter revenue to be at least $2.66bn. ®

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