Splunk Performs Following IPO

Market experts CRISIL GR&A believe that the global Big Data market will grow at 45% annually to reach $25 billion by 2015. Last year, global Big Data market was estimated to be worth $5.3 billion. Data analytics and management of this volume of data will become critical for growth. Researchers estimate that 90% of Fortune 500 companies will have Big Data initiatives underway by the end of this year. Companies supporting these Big Data initiatives are seeing strong growth.

Splunk’s Stellar Performance
Recently listed Splunk (NASDAQ:SPLK) reported its 19th consecutive quarter of strong revenue growth, with revenues rising 71% over the year to $44.5 million. Revenue growth was driven by a 61% increase in license revenues which grew to $30.2 million. Maintenance and service revenues grew 98% over the year and accounted for the remaining 32% of revenues. Despite strong top-line performance, Splunk reported a loss of $0.01 for the quarter. The market was projecting revenues of $39.8 million with a loss of $0.04 per share for the quarter.

The company’s international expansion efforts are faring well. International operations brought in 20% of the quarter’s revenues. Splunk ended the quarter with more than 1,600 customers, reporting an additional 400 new customers in the quarter.

Splunk raised its outlook for the year and now projects revenues at $183 million-$186 million, compared with revenues of $174 million-$177 million. For the current quarter, they project revenues of $45 million-$47 million. The market was looking for revenues of $176.9 million for the year and $44.6 million for the quarter.

Splunk Expanding into the Cloud
Last month end, Splunk launched its cloud-based Splunk Storm service available to the public after months of beta testing. Splunk Storm helps organizations manage and develop applications on public cloud platforms. Splunk Storm operates on the public cloud infrastructure but lets organizations monitor applications that are written in multiple languages and that operate on multiple platforms. Storm is thus able to deliver monitoring and troubleshooting applications and help the organizations gain insight into system performance.

In addition, as part of its product expansion drive, earlier this week, it launched the Splunk App for PCI Compliance 2.0. The Splunk App caters to the requirements of payment card industry (PCI) compliance. PCI compliance is a mandatory requirement for all organizations that accept credit cards. The solution combines a scalable investigation and forensics platform that will cater to the security strategy. The PCI data security standard (DSS) is the gold standard in the industry for securing this sensitive data and reducing credit card fraud. The solution includes scorecards and reports for PCI requirement and other analytical tools such as visualizations that indicate PCI compliance issues  and other security features such as an audit trail for log review.

Splunk’s stock is trading at $36.88 with a market capitalization of $3.53 billion. It is significantly higher than its IPO list price of $17.00. It had also released a secondary offering of shares at $28.25 a share in July 2012.