Courtesy of Benzinga.
After posting a strong beat on earnings Thursday, shares of Splunk (NASDAQ: SPLK) are trading up Friday. Summit Research has reiterated its Buy rating and maintained its $55 price target.
Analyst Srini Nandury noted that "Splunk now has beaten the mid-point of guidance by an average of 9.2 percent during each of the last nine quarters by an average of $6 million or 9.2 percent."
Thanks to new applications and new use cases along with investment in R&D, Splunk's momentum is expected to maintain upward velocity. After a conversation with management, Summit says it is "increasingly confident Splunk is rapidly becoming a platform for unstructured data, akin to Oracle/MS-SQL server platforms."
Aside from Splunk's sticky ecosystem, its "plethora of applications being built but its customers" will make it difficult for other companies to displace the tech company's ecosystem.
| Q3 2015 Revenue | Full Year 2015 Revenue | |
|---|---|---|
| Splunk | $105-$107 million | $423-$428 million |
| Consensus | $104 million | $412 million |
Key takeaways from the quarter according to Summit:
- More than 70 percent of license bookings came from existing customers
- 500 new customers added this quarter, bringing total customers to about 7900
- 226 orders greater than $100,000, with record number of transactions
- Quota carrying sales force increased to 226, up from 220 in 4Q
- Expected to finish the year with 300-310 quota carrying sales force
- Only 60 percent of quota carriers were tenured 12 months or more
Shares of Splunk were up 18.5 percent nearing Friday's close.
Posted-In: Srini Nandury Summit ResearchAnalyst Color Earnings Guidance Price Target Reiteration Analyst Ratings
