Although we don't believe in timing the market or panicking over market movements, we do like to keep an eye on big changes -- just in case they're material to our investing thesis.
What: Shares of Splunk (SPLK) rose nearly 13% Friday after the data-analysis software specialist reported better-than-expected fiscal second-quarter results.
So what: Total revenue rose 50% year over year to $66.9 million, beating the company's own projections, which called for sales of $61 to $63 million. Meanwhile, Splunk's adjusted loss came in at $0.01 per share. For reference, analysts were expecting a larger loss of $0.03 per share on the same basis.
Now what: As a result of last quarter's strong performance, management also raised their full-year revenue guidance to a range of $275 million to $281 million, up from their previous guidance of sales between $266 million and $274 million.
Splunk chairman and CEO Godfrey Sullivan weighed in, saying:
This past quarter marked a milestone for Splunk as we expanded the breadth of our product offerings beyond core Splunk Enterprise and premium apps by adding the beta version of Hunk: Splunk Analytics for Hadoop. We are pleased to welcome more than 400 new customers who are joining the Splunk family at an exciting time as we transition to a multi-product company.
Investors are rightfully pleased with Splunk's better-than-expected results, but remember, this company isn't profitable yet. Personally, with shares of Splunk currently trading at more than 23 times last year's sales, I'll be staying on the sidelines until the company can prove it can maintain this positive momentum long enough to profitably grow into its $5.7 billion market capitalization.
