The company did note that revenue generated by the sale of servers, storage and networking grew by 15% in the second quarter while software revenue grew by 17%. Services revenue, however, only increased by 2%, it said.

Roberts believes the issues faced by Cisco and HP are unique and don't reflect a broader trend.

"The data and anecdotal reports all point to strong growth going forward," said Roberts.

Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at , or subscribe to . His e-mail address is .

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