EMC's revenues reached $4.47bn (£2.2bn) for its first quarter while profit dropped 13% to $269m to R&D relating to recent acquisitions.

The storage vendor said its annual revenue forecasts would be unchanged and Joe Tucci, EMC CEO described the first quarter as "solid" and cited the firm's "diversified" product portfolio as a strength. Among its largest acquisitions EMC bought security vendor RSA and owns 85% of server virutalisation firm VMware. It also bought UK reseller Chonchango and disk maker Iomega.

On the storage hardware front, EMC said its high end storage array Symmetrix revenue increased 8%, mid range CLARiiON revenue increased 19% and Celerra network-attached storage revenue increased more than 50%, each compared with the year-ago quarter.

In a statement the company said: "Compared with the first quarter of 2007, EMC systems revenue increased 10% and represented 41% of total first-quarter revenue. Software license and maintenance revenue increased 18% and accounted for 41% of total revenue. Other services revenue grew 30% and represented 18% of total revenue."