IBM, Microsoft, Intel and Google reported their earnings throughout the fourth financial quarter of 2011 this week.  All four have seen growth, but only three managed to meet and exceed analysts’ expectations.

IBM’s net earnings stood up to the challenge, at $5.5 billion on revenue of $29.5 billion. Sales were up two percent this quarter, and full year earnings per share rose marginally to $14.85, resulting in a one percent gain for the company’s stock during after-hour trading.

Big Blue’s slight improvement is magnified in light of its Q3 results, when its core services unit has seen less growth than what analysts had in mind, but its cloud business doubled year-over-year.

Moving on to Microsoft, the software giant has seen a more noticeable overall increase – as well as decline. It reported profit of $6.6 billion on revenue of $20.9 billion, a five percent year-over-yera boost in sales that can be partially credited to the Entertainment and Devices unit. Its 15 percent growth compensated for Windows’ fall, which ended up accounting for only 22.7 percent of total revenue – the lowest level since Vista’s worst quarter.

Both Microsoft and Intel are looking beyond the PC market today, towards enterprise and mobile for the most part as well as the personal cloud (Xbox). This has been working out so far, considering that the chipmaker also reported some impressive figures.

With profit of $3.5 billion on revenue of $13.9 billion, Intel beat net earnings expectations and expanded sales by 22 percent within a year. Google on the other hand had some additional overhead to account for, and reported profit of $2.7 billion on revenue of $10.6 billion. It hired over 1,100 new employees in Q4, among other things.