HP finishes fiscal 2010 with $126bn in sales
HP completed fiscal year 2010 with double-digit growth in earnings and revenue, regardless of the sudden change in executive leadership following a scandal that involved the former CEO Mark Hurd who was forced to resign during the onset of the year's final quarter.

The technology vendor reported net earnings of $2.5bn (earnings per share $1.10) on $33.3bn in sales for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2010, according to an HP news release. Earnings were up five percent and sales were up eight percent year over year.

The company's earnings for the full fiscal year were $8.8bn on $126bn in sales. Full-year earnings were up 14 percent and sales were up 10 percent from fiscal 2009.

HP president and CEO Leo Apotheker said the company's market opportunity was vast and that he was confident it would continue to extend its market leadership in the future.

"HP proved once again that it is able to execute given its market strengths and technology leadership," he said in a statement. "I have seen firsthand that we have talented people who are focused on delivering value for our customers."

HP's commercial-segment growth in the fourth quarter was driven by the Enterprise Storage and Servers business, which grew 25 percent year over year. The networking segment delivered 50-percent growth, with revenue from 3Com ahead of plan. HP bought 3Com in April for about $2.7bn.

Revenue from the services segment, which includes infrastructure technology outsourcing, application services, technology services and business-process outsourcing, increased 0.4 percent in the fourth quarter.

Other segments include software, personal systems and imaging and printing.

Brocade recovers from last fiscal year's loss
Brocade took a number of significant steps during the final quarter of fiscal 2010, including the official launch of new headquarters and a new data center in San Jose, California, and the announcement of general availability of products that enable network fabrics in virtualized data center environments.

The company reported $23m in net earnings ($0.05 EPS) on $550m in sales for the fourth fiscal quarter, according to a company news release. Its earnings dropped about 28 percent, while revenue was up 5.5 percent year-over-year.

This was record quarterly revenue for the networking vendor, which it attributed to numerous factors, including all-time high revenue from the Ethernet business, comprised of both products and services. Another strong segment was the company's storage-networking business, which delivered strong sequential revenue growth.

Brocade CEO Michael Klayko noted in a statement the launch of the company's first Ethernet fabric products in November, designed to simplify data center networks by collapsing network layers and getting rid of the Spanning Tree Protocol. The technology is geared toward highly virtualized data center environments.

"Looking forward to FY11, we are particularly excited about Brocade's successful launch of the industry's first Ethernet fabric products and technologies, which we believe will serve as a catalyst for customers to rapidly migrate to virtualized data centers and cloud-optimized networks," Klayko said in a statement.

The company's 2010 full-year revenue was about $2.09bn, up about 7.2 percent from fiscal 2009. It recovered from a loss of about $81m in fiscal 2009, reporting net income of about $119m for full 2010. Brocade's full-year diluted earnings per share were $0.25.