Quarterly earnings season kicks off in earnest this week, and a lot of attention will be focused on a clutch of top enterprise players that are negotiating difficult transitions. Here’s what to look for when the numbers come over the wire.

IBM (April 18) – New markets key to growth

Big Blue, which reports on Monday, is a mystery wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a conundrum. IBM continued to lay off employees on a large scale over the past quarter (although exact numbers weren’t announced) with Grinch-y severance packages that reportedly paid out far less than buyouts have in the past. That could either be interpreted as a desperate cost-saving move or a bold statement about IBM’s confidence in its future.

As a company, IBM continues to shrink, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. CEO Virginia Rometty (right) and her entire leadership team have consistently stressed that they are after high-margin growth market segments and aren’t interested in just getting big. The fact that IBM has divested its low-margin semiconductor and server businesses over the last couple of years would indicate that it’s serious about that strategy.

Keep an eye on cloud computing revenue, which IBM breaks out in its earnings report. While the definition of cloud computing is too fuzzy to draw comparisons between IBM and competitors, the important thing to look for is growth from the roughly $10 billion in cloud revenue that IBM reported last year. Amazon Web Services reported 78 percent year-on-year revenue growth the previous quarter, which sets a high bar, but IBM has been investing heavily in its SoftLayer infrastructure.

Look also for any references to growth in the analytics business, which IBM said generated $20 billion last year. IBM has also been pushing into some new markets lately, including video delivery and mobile device management. And, of course, there’s Watson, which anchors a “cognitive computing” business that IBM believes will deliver $2 trillion in revenues over the next decade. This company has a lot of irons in the fire if it can just turn the corner on growth.

Intel (April 19) – The race to diversify

Intel will report earnings on Tuesday after the market closes. It’s expected to show top-line growth thanks to new product launches and its acquisition of programmable logic device maker Altera Corp. for nearly $17 billion last spring. Wall Street is looking for revenue of $13.93 billion and earnings per share of 49 cents. Intel recently guided the street upward and the whisper number for EPS is 53 cents.

Intel has been whipped for missing the market for mobile CPUs, but it has successfully diversified into storage, security and high-end servers. Keep an eye on the breakout results for its Data Center Group. This high-margin business is a good indicator of Intel’s future growth as the client computing side of the business declines.

VMware Inc. (April 19) – Turmoil at the top

VMware shares were slammed after its last earnings report in January. Despite beating Wall Street estimates, the company issued weak guidance for the current quarter. Consensus analyst estimates are 84 cents per share for the current quarter on $1.58 billion in revenue.

Look for continued strong growth of VMware’s NSX network virtualization platform, which boasted 1,200 paying customers at the end of last year, up eight-fold over a six-month period. Also look for strength in end-user computing and mobile device management as the benefits of last year’s Airwatch LLC acquisition kick in. VMware reported 50% growth in AirWatch bookings during 2015, and that momentum is expected to continue.

VMware has been rocked by multiple executive departures over the past year, including that of President and Chief Operating Officer Carl Eschenbach (right), Chief Strategist Chuck Hollis, Chief Technology Officer Ben Fathi, NSX chief Martin Casado and Chief Financial CFO Jonathan Chadwick. The company’s vCloud Air strategy has also caused confusion, with VMware initially declaring that it intended to be a top player in public cloud infrastructure and then repositioning itself as a specialty player in vertical markets. With its core business under pressure from containers, open source and customers’ move to the cloud, it’s safe to say this is a company in transition.

EMC (April 20) – No surprises, please

Don’t expect many surprises from EMC, which reports its earnings on Wednesday. While the company is in a holding pattern in advance of the anticipated acquisition by Dell, it’s making no big blockbuster deals, but it needs to move forward nonetheless, as the storage market makes its rapid transition from spinning disks to flash media. Analysts are forecasting earnings of 33 cents per share on anemic annualized growth projections of 2.7 percent. Revenues are expected to come in at $5.64 billion. EMC has more or less met forecasts for the past two quarters, and there’s no reason to expect this quarter’s results won’t be in line.

The biggest concern is EMC’s information infrastructure business, which saw sales fall 4 percent year-over-year to $5.1 billion in the previous quarter. The company has acknowledged that customers are switching to flash faster than it had originally anticipated, and it’s rushing to ramp up sales of its VMAX and XtremIO all-flash arrays amid some confusion about where those two critical products fit in its portfolio. Any evidence of an increasing slide in enterprise sales could drive down the stock and put the Dell deal in jeopardy. Suffice to say that the last thing EMC wants to do at this point is surprise anybody.

Microsoft (April 21) – Turning the corner

Microsoft stock has doubled over the past three years, which is saying a lot, since the stock was effectively flat for the entire decade before that. The company is the second-biggest public cloud player, and it has tried to leverage strong sales of its cloud-based Office 365 office suite to bring more enterprises into the fold. While the transition to software-as-a-service (SaaS) has resulted in a direct hit to the top line, Microsoft is steadfast in its belief that SaaS will be a bigger – and more profitable – business in the long term.

Consensus estimates for the current quarter are 64 cents per share on revenue of $22.11 billion. Microsoft delivered a pleasant surprise in its previous quarter, beating consensus estimates by about 10 percent. However, revenue fell short of expectations and was down slightly from the previous year.

Microsoft is negotiating tricky transitions on several fronts. PC sales plunged nearly 10 percent in the first quarter of 2016, a collapse that surprised even the skeptics, and that takes a direct bite out of Microsoft’s Windows 10 sales. The company has struggled in the mobile market, despite mostly glowing reviews for its latest Surface tablets. The tablet market itself has flattened, which doesn’t help.

Yet analysts are mostly positive about the future. The reinvigorated company under CEO Satya Nadella is moving methodically to the cloud. Revenues for the Azure cloud platform jumped 127 percent in the most recent quarter. Microsoft also boasted that over one-third of Fortune 500 companies have adopted its Enterprise Mobility management and security products, proving that you don’t need a strong device story to make money in mobility.

Enterprise customers should watch the cloud numbers like a hawk. Microsoft’s warm embrace of open-source software has given it a robust Linux offering to go with its Windows-in-the-cloud platform. If it can achieve anywhere near the cloud growth it experienced in the previous quarter, Microsoft will come out of this earnings season with fresh momentum.

Photo by Derek Σωκράτης Finch via Flickr CC