Shares of TIBCO Software (TIBX +0.00%) jumped more than 2% overnight. The data management and analysis expert posted another solid quarter last night, just as expected.
The stock has notched a 28% gain year to date and 43% over the last 12 months, easily crushing the market on both counts. What's more, TIBCO is poised for even stronger business growth going forward. Share prices are sure to follow in the herky-jerky style that's so popular with disruptive tech companies.
TIBCO reported non-GAAP earnings of $0.27 per share on $255 million in revenue. The bottom-line tally landed exactly where analysts had expected, breaking TIBCO's streak of 16 straight earning beats. Sales were $5 million below analyst estimates, held back by European currency exchange effects. On a constant currency basis, the 11% reported sales gain turns into an 18% jump.
Even Greek banks are buying these products right now
Currency effects are notoriously hard to predict, and certainly out of management's control, anyhow. More importantly, CEO Vivek Ranadive told me that sales were strong across Europe -- even in the countries suffering the most from economic pressures. "Ironically, we're closing deals even with Spanish and Greek banks," he said in an exclusive phone interview. "Other than the currency impact, we're not seeing deals disappearing, deals slowing down, we're not seeing any of that."
This underscores my core thesis on TIBCO, which is that the company will perform even when computing budgets are tight. In fact, it's one of those rare companies that should do better when its customers are under the gun because TIBCO's tools provide unique business advantages at a very reasonable implementation cost.
TIBCO's biggest strength lies in its ability to handle truly epic data loads at breakneck speed. This is the company's key selling point versus analytics tools from more traditional data wranglers IBM (NYSE: IBM) or Oracle (ORCL 1.42%). "We can transport volumes of data unheard of, billions and billions of events," Vivek said on last night's analyst call. "Nobody can touch that, especially as you start making machines part of the social network. If you want to truly create a social network that incorporates both machines and people, and then you want to be able to convert customers into fans," then TIBCO is the only game in town.
Rewriting a page from Apple's playbook
And isn't that what business is all about? Apple (AAPL +0.44%) is perhaps the best example of making fans out of regular customers. Wouldn't your company like to have tools that could do the same for your products by reacting in real time to customer actions and business data?
So that's the selling spiel, and it's working very well. TIBCO is still looking for a new head of North American sales, but keeps hiring more salespeople as the search goes on. "It's not competition that's our biggest challenge today," Vivek said. "It's just our own blocking and tackling."
TIBCO plays an increasingly vital part in the big data ballet, where software specialists of all stripes hustle to squeeze business value out of today's data-soaked world. There's another company riding that wave, often below the market's radar. Like TIBCO, this stock has roughly tripled in value over the last three years. Read all about this surprising market crusher in our special report: "The Only Stock You Need To Profit From the NEW Technology Revolution." The report is totally free today, but won't stay that way forever, so grab your copy right now.
