The tech earnings season starts in earnest Tuesday following several weeks of unusual stock market volatility that has investors on pins and needles.

Their spirits can’t have been boosted by one early report: Cloudera Inc.’s April 2 bombshell announcement that it expects full-year revenues to come in about 4 percent below analysts’ estimates. In the recent frothy tech environment, that amounts to a disaster, and investors responded by sending the stock down 40 percent in one day, where it has remained.

But the big-data company’s circumstances probably aren’t indicative of the overall market. Analysts aren’t expecting any big surprises over the next couple of weeks, when IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp., SAP SE, Google LLC, Amazon.com Inc. and other tech giants all lay their quarterly cards on the table.

The biggest tectonic shift could be the incursion of cloud vendors into the pantheon of top systems companies, an indication that cloud has truly arrived in the enterprise. Beyond that, no surprise, the rich are expected to get richer.

IBM growth should continue

IBM kicks off the earning season after the market closes on Tuesday. The company will be attempting to stage an encore to its January performance when it halted a five-and-a-half-year skid by showing its first quarter of revenue growth. Wikibon analyst Ralph Finos estimates IBM’s revenues will be up about 3 percent this quarter — not much, but quite an accomplishment given recent history.

“They planted the flag by reporting growth last quarter and have to do it again this quarter,” he said. Indeed, the company’s financial leadership has built enough wiggle room into the numbers to stage a repeat performance comfortably.

The thing to watch with IBM is its “strategic imperatives” of analytics, security, cloud and cognitive products and services. Those constituted 46 percent of revenue in the fourth quarter and should tick up a bit in the first, Finos estimated. The analytics business, which houses the strategic Watson cognitive platform, needs to improve on its fourth-quarter performance, when it grew only 6 percent. “Analytics need to be a lot better,” Finos said.

It could be the Big Blue stalwarts that make the difference this quarter, said Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy. “Ironically, it could come down to the performance of the Systems Division, which has been doing well, particularly Power Systems and storage,” he said. Finos concurred. “The new mainframe cycle in this quarter will keep them in positive territory overall,” he said.

Finos expects IBM’s cloud business to grow a respectable 23 percent. The company “seems to have found a sustainable balance between investments in new innovations — like artificial intelligence, analytics and quantum computing – and belt-tightening measures,” said Charles King, president and principal analyst at Pund-IT Inc. IBM was reported in January to be in the process of reassigning 30,000 people from its Global Technology Services division to other, presumably higher-margin roles within the company.

One area where IBM and other systems vendors may finally find relief is in stabilization of memory prices. The volatility of the past year was blamed by several hardware makers for unpredictable financial performance, but in a recent report, Mizuho Securities Co., Ltd. Analyst Vijay Rakesh forecast “very gradual, balanced DRAM supply growth” through 2019. That could show up in results from companies like Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., Nutanix Inc. and Dell Technologies Inc., which report in May and June.

Update: IBM beat its numbers Tuesday, but a disappointing growth forecast knocked its shares down almost 6 percent in after-hours trading.

Cloudy days

The big three cloud providers all report within three days of each other, and no one’s expecting anything but more up-and-to-the-right.

“I don’t see the pecking order changing dramatically,” Moorhead said. “I expect Amazon Web Services to do well on the largest base followed by Microsoft Azure and then Google Cloud Platform.” The smaller players will show faster growth than the giants, he added, but the giants will remain at the top.

President Trump’s fiery anti-Amazon Twitter campaign has dinged Amazon’s stock price, but it’s not likely to put a dent in the retailer’s growth, or the success of its highly profitable cloud infrastructure business. Finos estimates Amazon Web Services is on a $24 billion annual run rate with expected growth of 37 percent in the most recent quarter, slightly less than the 40 percent-plus pace of 2017 but on top of a much larger base. Analysts expect earnings per share for Amazon Inc. to be $1.19, up 6 percent from a year ago.

If there’s any change in the balance of power evident in first-quarter earnings, “it’s likely to center on Amazon regaining share from or losing additional ground to Microsoft, IBM and Google,” King said.

Finos pointed out that even at a conservative 25 percent annual growth rate, Amazon Web Services will be one of the top five enterprise IT vendors by next year and No. 2 by 2022. That means cloud will effectively have redefined a 60-year-old industry in a little more than a decade. “Something’s happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear,” he said, channeling Buffalo Springfield.

Microsoft may surprise again

If anyone can rip the leadership baton out of Amazon’s hands, it will be Microsoft, which reports earnings coincident with Amazon on April 26. The revitalized company will face a challenge topping its 2017 infrastructue-as-a-service performance, in which Microsoft blew away estimates in every quarter and nearly doubled growth of its Azure IaaS business four quarters in a row.

Moorhead expects that torrid growth to continue, although another doubling is unlikely. However, “I’m expecting Azure to grow deep double digits,” he said. Microsoft continues to do an exceptional job of leveraging its software-as-a-service applications such as Office 365 to drive Azure business.

“Plus, Office and other applications provide the company clear points of competitive differentiation,” said King. “Google’s G Suite is the only real challenger to Microsoft in that regard, and it trails far behind.” When its SaaS portfolio is included, Microsoft is the world’s largest cloud computing vendor.

Finos expects the Azure business to grow about 80 percent, or even more if the on-premises Azure Stack is included. He pegs the company’s Intelligent Cloud business at $7.5 billion, up 11 percent, and Office 360 growing at a 36 percent rate. And Microsoft has recently shown a penchant for beating even the most optimistic estimates over the past year. “We could see some upside surprise from Microsoft,” Moorhead said.

SAP: lull or turning point?

Investors and customers will be watching SAP’s report with particular interest, given that the company’s cloud revenue growth has softened in each of the last two quarters. SAP stock dropped more than 10 percent immediately followings its Jan. 30 earnings report, although it has recovered somewhat since. Executives reassured investors at the time that the company’s cloud bookings were strong and the pipeline full.

Analysts want to see proof. “I’m a bit concerned with SAP’s cloud slowdown but I’m not necessarily surprised given the early movers have moved to HANA already,” said Moorhead, referring to the latest release of the company’s flagship enterprise resource planning suite. In January, SAP said S4/HANA had 7,900 customers, up 46 percent from the previous year.

But beyond ERP, SAP’s growth strategy is unclear. Its business network group, which includes acquired businesses such as Ariba Inc., Concur Technologies Inc., Fieldglass Inc. and SuccessFactors Inc., is perceived as being a bit long in the tooth and in need of refreshing.

One metric to watch will be the performance of Callidus Software Inc., a maker of cloud-based sales force management software that SAP acquired for $2.4 billion earlier this month. Callidus is expected to anchor the German software giant’s battle with Salesforce.com Inc., a tall order considering Salesforce.com’s so-far-successful grow-at-all-costs strategy.

The slowdown of the past two quarters “looks like a natural lull between organic growth spurts, but if it lasts much longer we could see the company actively break out of the cycle,” said King. That could be a problem.

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