These are not gold rush days in the tech sector. We can’t expect huge gains from the established tech giants. Modest growth is just fine in this slow market.

And that’s just what we got from IBM yesterday. It had modest growth in the fourth quarter and for 2011 overall. Keeping it steady were services and the company’s software group.

Global Technology Services revenues increased 3 percent to $10.5 billion in the fourth quarter. For the year, its services were $40 billion, up 7% compared to last year.

Global Business Services revenues were up 3 percent, totaling $4.9 billion. Overall for 2011, the services sector had $19.2 billion in revenues, up about 6%.

The services growth reflected the company’s overall revenues which were up 7%, totaling $106 billion for the year.

In the results you can see the relationship between IBM’s services and its software group. The software group had fourth quarter revenues of $7.6 billion, up about 8%. Annual revenues were up 10% to $30 billion.

In particular, IBM showed fantastic returns in its Websphere Group, with a 21% increase in revenues. In the Information Management group, Netezza had some astounding results, showing a massive 70% increase in revenues. Netezza is riding the data boom with its data warehouse appliances and advanced analytics applications.

Mark Loughridge, IBM Senior Vice President and CFO, Finance and Enterprise Transformation said this in the earnings call:

Our distributed database grew double digits, led by strong performances from our Netezza offerings, which were up nearly 70%. This appliance complements and extends our Business Analytics portfolio with a rapidly deployed low-cost of ownership solution for high performance queries and analytics.

For the quarter, almost 1/3 of the transactions were with new Netezza clients. Since acquiring Netezza, IBM has expanded its customer base by over 40%. And when we go head-to-head against competition in proof of concepts, we had a win rate of over 80% this quarter.

These impressive results tie directly into IBM’s business analytics services, which has well more than 2,000 consultants and a group of more than 200 mathematics and data science professionals.