IBM released its 4Q11 financial report last week, and while the company beat Wall Street’s expectations, its Systems & Technology segment offered up mixed results: Power Systems are still throwing devastating upper cuts to HP and Oracle/Sun while the mainframe business took a nap.

Mark Loughridge, IBM’s senior vice president and CFO for Finance and Enterprise Transformation, delivered the news to investors. Overall Systems & Technology revenue of $5.8 billion was down 8 percent, but this performance has to be placed against the super strong mainframe growth of nearly 70 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Meanwhile, here’s a few of the more interesting comments from his report surrounding the key Systems & Technology brands:

"System z revenue declined 31 percent as we wrapped on the successful launch of our zEnterprise 196 last year. MIPS declined 4 percent this quarter. System z gross profit margin was up, reflecting a higher proportion of microcode upgrades, which is typical at this point in the product cycle.

Power grew 6 percent, this is the fifteenth consecutive quarter of share gains in Power. We continued our success in competitive takeouts. In the fourth quarter, we had over 350 competitive displacements, which resulted in over $350 million of business. This is our strongest quarter in terms of competitive displacements since we started tracking this in 2006. Roughly 60 percent of this business came from HP, with most of the balance from Oracle/Sun. 2011 was the second year in a row we had over 1,000 competitive displacements which this year generated over $1 billion of business.

System x revenue declined 2 percent; we anticipate this is in line with the market.

Storage hardware revenue was down 1 percent. When combined with the storage software growth of 30 percent, the total grew 5 percent.

Retail Store Solutions had a great quarter, up 9 percent, and we continued to grow share.

When you look at the full year, Systems and Technology delivered solid performance with revenue up 6 percent, gross margin up 1.6 points, and $1.6 billion in pre-tax income, up 12 percent year to year."

Nice. Of course, wow, 15 quarters of competitive share gains with Power (mainly Unix is what Loughridge is referring to). That’s share growth over 3.75 years. Pretty impressive, really.

More importantly, what I find really interesting is that Power Systems revenue grew 6 percent while other servers and storage hardware actually declined, especially since the fourth quarter of 2010 was the first quarter that offered a full lineup of POWER7-based Power Systems. They're still selling.