The companies in Marshall’

Of the companies in Marshall’s coverage universe, only Apple, IBM and Dell had positive returns and saw their shares rise by an average of 20 percent. By contrast, the three biggest decliners were Hewlett-Packard, Juniper and NetApp.

By comparison, Apple, IBM and Dell set lower barriers and ended up having positive revenues surprises, and have moved up their forward revenues estimates by about 17 percent. “Setting conservative targets will again remain critical in 2012,” Marshall writes.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be positive trends to look for. Certain megatrends in computing will sail on, in spite of the rough economic waters. “Cloud computing and mobile internet remain firmly in place and can drive outperformance for companies positively exposed,” Marshall says in his note.

The growth in mobile customers like smartphones

The growth in mobile customers like smartphones and tablets will spur ever more rich and complex computing environments in the cloud, meaning more and better data centers packing more computing power into the same or smaller footprint. Marshall mentions microservers, which brings to mind HP’s Project Moonshot, which aims to create dense racks of small servers, as an important trend to watch. “We think many data centers could look to microserver solutions that deliver thousands of cores in a rack and order of magnitude improvements in performance/power,” writes Marshall. These microservers, he says, could be powered by both x86 chips from Intel or Advanced Micro Devices, or by ARM-based chips.

And since there will be more servers — all of them virtualized, allowing one single server to act like dozens or even hundreds of servers, plus increased demands for storage and video — they will require higher-performing connections. That’s going to push companies building data centers to adopt Ethernet fabrics. On top of that, more companies build servers that support faster 10 gigabit Ethernet. Marshall argues that these Ethernet fabrics could constitute as much as one-third of the $6 billion market for data center switching within three years.

Then there’s big data. With more information than they know what to do with scattered all over the place, companies are struggling to make sense of it all. Large enterprises will be investing in data integration tools to get a unified view of all their information. “We believe organizations will continue investing in data integration tools which can help link historical and real-time data, and enable more valuable business intelligence and predictive analytics,” Marshall writes, adding that the market is worth about $2 billion today, however is in the “early innings of a growth cycle.”

Tagged with: Apple, Cisco, Cisco Systems, Dell, enterprise, enterprise hardware, enterprise software, Hewlett-Packard, HP, IBM, Juniper, networking, Oracle

— Robert Levine, author of “Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back,” in conversation with Katy Bachman of Adweek

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