Outsourcing Is The Growth Engine At Accenture
IBM
wasn’t alone. Service
provider Accenture also reported surprisingly good numbers. While sales were down 3% to $2.8 billion, profits rose to
$118.7 million.
Much
of the revenue growth was in Outsourcing, up 33% to $828 million.
Business consulting was down 15% to $2 billion.
This, of course, is in line with the experience of many firms
in the professional services market.
Microsoft Continues To Show Substantial
Growth
Microsoft
announced 8% revenue growth for revenues of $7.84 billion for the
quarter, with operating income up 14% to $3.72 billion and net
income at $2.79 billion, up only about 1%.
The
next quarter is an important one for the software giant, with lots
of big products going into GA (Windows Server 2003, Visual Studio®
.NET 2003, Exchange 2003 and Office 2003.
Office income has continued to increase (9% for Information
Workers this quarter) and the Beta 2 for 2003 is expected to exceed
600,000 copies. Server platforms (all products) were up 21% for the
quarter, which Microsoft believes is driven in part by continuing
market movement from UNIX to Windows-based products.
A
big source of growth is Microsoft’s new business solution
products, led by the acquisition of Navision in 2002 and
Microsoft’s new CRM product.
Microsoft anticipates additional products and growth in this
sector and is actively seeking to change the ISV business model,
convincing these business partners to let Microsoft provide baseline
function (much as they provide operating systems and tools) and to
have ISV’s provide vertical market function on top.
We expect some larger ISVs may not agree.
Microsoft
expects that the next quarter will be about the same size as this
one, with somewhat higher operating income, while revenue for the
fiscal year is expected to be in the range of $33.1 to $33.8
billion, with operating income of $14.8 to $15.1 billion.
It’s
interesting to note that Microsoft now lists “the
availability of competitive products or services such as the Linux
operating system at prices below our prices or for no charge”
among the factors that could affect its actual performance.
