Apple, IBM Survivors In Evercore’s IT Hardware Initiation

Robert Cihra, who until about a month ago was with Caris & Co., today kicked off coverage of the IT hardware sector at Evercore Partners with an Overweight ratings on Apple (AAPL), EMC (EMC), and International Business Machines (IBM), and an Equal Weight rating on Dell (DELL) and NetApp (NTAP), and an Underweight rating on Hewlett-Packard (HPQ).

Cihra’s Big Picture premise, if you will, is that “The Best Hardware Companies are Really Software Companies (and Maybe Vice Versa).”

In that vein, expects that the six companies under coverage, with $750 billion in combined market cap, $443 billion in 2011 projected revenue, and $64 billion in profit, have “multiple technology drivers” that may help.

These include “an explosion in wireless access and mobile thin-client architectures,” �virtualization enabling step-function improvements in utilization for rapid-ROI infrastructure,” and the rise of �big data,� which is “driving demand for enterprise storage and analytics.”

It’s all interconnected, he argues: “virtualization driving cloud computing that feeds mobile thin-clients that spit out big data, together setting up some of the greatest technology disruption but also innovation since client/server computing was introduced.”

Cihra sees global IT spending rising 6% to 7% this year, but slowing next year.

The PC will continue to make up half of annual IT spending, and something like the tablet computer is more important for what it “represents” than what it actually is: “closer cousins of smartphones, more notable for what they leave out as what they put in, leveraging light-weight OS, processor, storage and �apps,� as a game-changer for digital media consumption but perhaps more so in their attempt to ultimately challenge PCs in the clearest shot yet of thin-clients migrating focus from local COMPUTING to simply ACCESS, pushing heavy lifting back into the cloud.”

While it’s hard to big tech companies to stay aloft, generally, the big are becoming bigger, writes Cihra:

One can more appropriately view the market�s largest hardware vendors as �Systems + Software + Services Behemoths,� where competitive strengths can include SCALE itself (e.g., global reach; leverage in component sourcing; end-to-end one-stop-shops for full �solutions�).