Talend (TLND) delivered a fourth-quarter earnings report on Tuesday that showed revenue jumping 36% from the year-ago quarter. The stock was up about 9.5% around noon on Wednesday as investors were impressed with the company's guidance.
Our digital world produces a ton of data, and Talend helps companies draw insights from it. Its Data Fabric platform gets disparate programs -- such as those for analytics, payments, and cybersecurity -- to all play nicely together. Data analysis is becoming more critical than ever for companies to stay competitive. As businesses operations continue to move online, software integration is becoming a huge pain point that Talend is successfully addressing.
Well aware of its large market opportunity, the company is investing heavily in itself. Its financial losses are mounting, as significant research and development and marketing costs are pushing earnings further into the red.
But these up-front costs could very well pay huge rewards later. Its subscription revenue, which is the fees companies pay for the right to use Talend's software, rose 40% over last year. Its cloud-based and international customers are experiencing incredible growth rates, with both seeing revenue more than double in year-over-year comparisons.
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Talend results: The raw numbers
| Metric | Q4 2017 | Q4 2016 | Year-Over-Year Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $41.5 million | $30.5 million | 36% |
| Operating income | ($10,684) | ($4,543) | N/A |
| Adjusted EPS | ($0.28) | ($0.13) | N/A |
Operating income in thousands. Data source: Talend. EPS = earnings per share.
What happened with Talend this quarter?
Several recent developments suggest that Talend's accelerated cloud subscription growth rates will likely continue in 2018:
- A recent partnership with Amazon.com and Cognizant will deploy Cloud Data Lakes over Amazon Web Services.
- Achieving Microsoft Gold Cloud Competency & Co-Sell Partner Status could lead to further integration with Microsoft Azure.
- Updates to Talend's Data Fabric solution now allow companies to seamlessly manage their information across the cloud solutions of Amazon, Google, Snowflake, and Cloudera. Multicloud integration matters because more than 50% of customers are already using more than one cloud computing vendor.
- Subscription revenue in Asia-Pacific grew more than 100% annually for the third straight quarter.
What management had to say
CEO Mike Tuchen elaborated on his company's plans to offer both public and private cloud-based products, as well as what to expect in the coming year. He was quoted in a company press release as saying:
During the year, we significantly strengthened our cloud capabilities, including multi-cloud support to help our customers execute their cloud transition. As we enter 2018, we believe the success we are experiencing with enterprise adoption demonstrates our ability to capture an increasing share of the big data and cloud integration market.
Considering that his company exists to draw insights out of data, it was quite fitting that Tuchen said after the conference call in an interview with Barron's that "the macro takeaway is, the cloud is exploding, and our cloud is along with that."
Looking forward
Talend guided for $200 million of revenue in the current fiscal year, which would be around 33% top-line growth over 2017. If it continues to grow cloud-based and international sales at over 100%, partner with the largest cloud providers, and sign on big-name customers, it's likely that the company will blow past these estimates.
