Strong Q3 Results Push Splunk to Multiyear High

When Splunk Inc. (NASDAQ: SPLK) reported its fiscal third-quarter financial results late on Thursday, the company said that it had $0.17 in earnings per share (EPS) and $328.7 million in revenue. Consensus estimates had called for $0.14 in EPS on revenue of $309 million. The same period of last year reportedly had EPS of $0.10 and $244.8 million in revenue.

During this quarter, Splunk signed more than 450 new enterprise customers, including the likes of 21st Century Fox, Nutanix and Johns Hopkins University.

Looking ahead to the fourth quarter, the company expects to see total revenues in the range of $388 million to $390 million, with an operating margin of roughly 16%. Consensus estimates are $0.32 in EPS on $383.6 million in the quarter.

On the books, Splunk cash and cash equivalents totaled $393.3 million at the end of the quarter, down from $421.3 million at the end of the previous fiscal year.

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Doug Merritt, president and CEO, Splunk, commented:

I’m proud of our global performance for the quarter and our increased outlook through the rest of the year. Splunk announced a wide range of innovations at .conf2017 including native support for metrics and machine learning updates to Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud; new event analytics capabilities in Splunk IT Service Intelligence; new content updates for Splunk Enterprise Security; and a host of new use case-specific solutions. Splunk customers are seizing upon the growing opportunity machine data presents and only Splunk can help them get answers on-premises, in the cloud or across hybrid environments.

Shares of Splunk hit a multiyear high of $81.54 Friday morning. The stock has a 52-week low of $50.64 and a consensus analyst price target of just $75.53.

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