BEAS: BEA Shows Which “Equipment and Software” Spending is Slowing

From William Trent, CFA of Stock Market Beat

BEA Systems (BEAS) is down following an earnings preannouncement:

BEA Systems, Inc., a world leader in enterprise and communications infrastructure software, today announced certain preliminary financial results for its fiscal first quarter ended April 30, 2007. BEA expects to report first quarter total revenues between $342 million and $347 million, with license revenue expected to be in the range of $111 million to $116 million.

Analysts had been expecting the company to generate $389 million in revenues.

“This quarter we saw a difficult selling environment, especially in the Americas, and several large deals slipped out of the quarter. During the quarter, BEA made several changes in our sales organization, especially in aligning our sales force around new products. We believe these changes are positive for BEA in the long run, but implementing these changes caused some disruption in the short run,” said Alfred Chuang, BEA’s founder, chairman and chief executive. “Several geographies outside the US performed well. AquaLogic had another strong quarter, especially the AquaLogic BPM product, and we are very well positioned to continue our leadership position in the SOA market.”

We have noted that the economic slowdown has been particularly pronounced with regard to business spending on equipment and software. Meanwhile, rivals such as Oracle (ORCL – Annual Report), SAP (SAP – Annual Report) and IBM (IBM – Annual Report) have all been fairly upbeat.

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