Two of the largest storage vendors — NetApp and Brocade — this week reported disappointing financial results for the quarter that ended July 29. Their executives used terms like “IT headwinds” and “macroeconomic factors” that suggest the problems were beyond their control and part of a larger financial picture.

NetApp’s revenue of $1.46 billion and forecast of $1.61 billion were both below analysts’ expectations, fueled by a recently optimistic analyst day held by the vendor. At least NetApp’s revenue grew year over year — Brocade reported storage switch sales fell six percent from last year.

Unlike most storage vendors, NetApp and Brocade’s quarter ended in July instead of June, so they got hit by the chaos around the debt ceiling debate in Congress that led to a roller-coaster stock market.
“Headwinds in the IT market, federal spending and the overall global economy made for a challenging quarter for the company,” Brocade CEO Mike Klayko said on his company’s earnings call. “The storage business is not immune to macro IT factors. Fluctuation in demand levels is normal and to be expected, particularly in this period of heightened economic uncertainty.”

NetApp said sales were strong last quarter until falling off a cliff in July. Executives blamed the debt ceiling crisis and “macroeconomic uncertainty,” saying federal government agencies and financial services were hit particularly hard.

NetApp CEO Tom Georgens said six of its 23 largest accounts are financial services companies, and all six had booking declines from the same quarter last year. He said that led him to believe NetApp’s sales decline was caused by overall economic factors rather than gains by competitors.

“We exploded out of April, we closed last quarter exceptionally strong,” Georgens said. “May was very strong, so there was no evidence that we had drained the swamp. And June was strong, so we were rolling. We were ahead of our forecast, and we felt really, really good about where we were. What we didn’t expect is the U.S. side of the house weakened as the quarter wore on. And financial services … the fact that all six of them in our major accounts program was down is an indicator that something’s going on there that I don’t think is specific to NetApp.”

Georgens said he doesn’t think the downturn will last as long as the one that began in late 2008, but he’s not sure of that.

“I don’t feel like we’re on the trajectory that we were in a couple years back,” he said. “I may feel that way 90 days from now, but it doesn’t yet feel that way today. This government thing — I don’t know how much the political overhang is a factor here, and we’ll just see what happens. But right now, we’re just going to assume that the current environment is going to stay roughly at this level going forward, and we’ll see where it goes from there.”

Brocade executives said they expect storage – particularly Fibre Channel SANs – to rebound because demand remains strong. Klayko said Brocade’s annual customer survey this year found that 80% of its storage customers said they expected to grow or maintain their FC switch spending over the next three years.

The vendor is starting to push its 16 Gbps technology, claiming there is demand for more bandwidth for applications such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and analytics. Klayko said Hewlett-Packard, IBM, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems and Fujitsu Technology Systems are already selling Brocade’s 16-gig switches.

“The buying dynamic continues to be very strong for Fibre Channel,” Brocade CTO Dave Stevens said. “It continues to be the dominant technology in the data center for pooled storage environments.”
Of course, demand doesn’t always turn into implementation – as NetApp and Brocade discovered last quarter.

Brocade’s preliminary results call for revenue of about $333 million to $336 million in storage gear revenue, which is a five percent to six percent year-over-year decline instead of the three percent to five percent increase the vendor originally projected. The new figures also represent a drop of 14 percent to 15 percent from the previous quarter. Brocade’s FC sales usually decline no more than two percent for the quarter ending in July. Brocade’s Ethernet sales also missed expectation although they will still be up at least 12% from last year.

It’s hard to say exactly why Brocade missed its sales goals, but there are three possibilities: FC SAN sales have dropped n recent months, Cisco has picked up market share, or Brocade has internal problems that caused it to miss its forecast.

Part of the problem is because Brocade sells its products through OEM deals with storage vendors, it has less clear expectations of coming sales than vendors who sell directly. That makes it tougher to accurately forecast its revenue. Still, Brocade said its sales last quarter were hurt by “weaker-than-expected storage end-user demand, which was down slightly from the previous quarter.” But Brocade’s biggest storage partner, EMC, beat its expectations last quarter and other storage vendors did about as well as expected.

Brocade’s quarter runs through July while most others end in June, so perhaps sales fell off during July. We’ll get a better idea of this when Cisco (Wednesday), NetApp (Aug. 17) and Brocade (Aug. 18) report their earnings in the coming weeks. Those earnings reports could also help clarify if Cisco picked up share in FC switching.

Wall Street analyst Kaushik Roy of Merriman Capital maintains that the FC storage market remains strong, and that iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) haven’t made much of a dent in SANs.

“Considering the healthy SAN sales from EMC, IBM, NetApp/Engenio, Hewlett-Packard/3PAR, Dot Hill and others, we do not believe that the end markets for Fibre Channel SANs are converting to iSCSI or FCoE faster than expected,” Roy wrote in a research note issued today.

In the statement released last Friday, Brocade CEO Mike Klayko said he would give details on plans to grow revenue and “manage expenses” during its earnings call. By manage expenses, does he mean Brocade will follow Cisco’s recent heavy layoffs?

Industry sources say Brocade has been for sale for several years, with Hewlett-Packard and Dell looking at it before deciding to buy Ethernet switch vendors – HP bought 3Com in 2009 and Dell recently said it would acquire Force 10. Brocade has also had a lot of management turnover since it acquired Ethernet vendor Foundry in 2009, most recently losing CFO Richard Deranleau in June.

“Management’s credibility has sunk to the bottom and some current (and past) investors are wondering why the board is not acting on it,” Roy said. However, he added, “Brocade is still an attractive acquisition target for companies who want to enter the datacenter market” and listed Oracle and private equity firms as candidates to acquire the switch vendor.