When it comes to forecasts, who do you believe?

There is something to say about industry clout, and perhaps no tenchnology company has more historical industry street-cred than Intel.

Just in the past week, Intel chimed in on 2 markets that have huge impact on the hard drive market: Servers and PCs.

Servers:
Last week, Bloomberg reports: “Intel Server-Chip Sales Fueled by Mobile Data, CFO Says” which further supports the notion that more smartphones and tablets sold mean more servers and storage sold, thus more hard drives. And not just growth, “explosive” growth, Intel’s Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith says. Per Bloomberg, “There’s a significant, maybe even an insatiable, demand driver for more and more performance and computing power that’s moving into the cloud,” Smith said in an interview yesterday. “What gets lost is the explosive growth of all of these devices connecting to the Internet is driving a $10 billion dollar server business.” The impact of smartphones and tablets and cloud computing is real…real good. The article goes on to say that Intel’s forecast second-quarter revenue may be about $1 billion more than analysts had estimated. And like I have said before, more server chips = more hard drives.

PCs
Last week, Intel CEO, Paul Otellini indicated “PC growth in 2011 won’t be as weak as analysts predict” according to VentureBeat. The article cites Mr. Otellini’s taking issue with the analysts projections for growth of the PC market in 2011. According to the VentureBeat article, “Our views differ from theirs…We are expecting more than 400 million PCs to ship this year. Otellini said Intel typically has more insight into emerging markets than the market researchers do and that may explain the difference. Based on Intel’s numbers today, Otellini said he expects they will revise their figures upward.” So, like Intel’s server chip business, more desktops and notebooks…more hard drives. I for one will follow Intel’s lead on this. Like Seagate, they have too much historical data, customer insights and understanding of where their markets are heading than perhaps anyone else.

Who do you believe?

Photo by: BBC/PA