How much a stock's price changes over time is important for most investors, since price performance can both impact your investment portfolio and help you compare investment results across sectors and industries.

Another factor that can influence investors is FOMO, or the fear of missing out, especially with tech giants and popular consumer-facing stocks.

What if you'd invested in Splunk (SPLK) ten years ago? It may not have been easy to hold on to SPLK for all that time, but if you did, how much would your investment be worth today?

Splunk's Business In-Depth

With that in mind, let's take a look at Splunk's main business drivers.

San Francisco, CA-based Splunk Inc. provides software solutions that enable enterprises to gain real-time operational intelligence by harnessing the value of their data. The company’s offerings enable users to investigate, monitor, analyze and act on machine data and big data, irrespective of format or source, and helps in operational decision making.

The company’s flagship offering, Splunk Enterprise, is primarily a machine data platform. It can collect and index petabytes of machine data on a daily basis. Splunk Enterprise also enables users to interactively explore, analyze and visualize data stored in sources such as Hadoop and Amazon S3.

Splunk Cloud delivers the benefits of Splunk Enterprise deployed and managed reliably and scalably as a service. Splunk Light provides log search and analysis, which are designed, priced and packaged for small IT environments.

The company’s premium solutions include Splunk Enterprise Security (ES), Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) and Splunk User Behavior Analytics (UBA). These solutions address emerging security threats and information and event management (SIEM), monitor health and key performance indicators of critical IT, and detect cyber-attacks and insider threats in business operations, respectively.

Splunk complements the aforementioned services with few add-ons, including Splunk Machine Learning Toolkit (MLTK), Splunk App for AWS, Splunk DB Connect and Cisco Firepower App for Splunk.

Splunk generated revenues of $2.67 billion in fiscal 2022. License and Cloud Services contributed 39.5% and 35.3% of total revenues in the fiscal, respectively. Maintenance and services revenues accounted for the rest.

Splunk Enterprise customers pay license fees generally based on their estimated peak daily indexing capacity needs. The company also generates revenues from enterprise adoption agreements (EAAs). Splunk Cloud customers pay an annual subscription fee based on the combination of the volume of data indexed per day and the amount of data stored.

The company faces significant competition from the likes of Oracle, IBM, Intel and Microsoft, among others.

Story continues

Bottom Line

Anyone can invest, but building a successful investment portfolio requires research, patience, and a little bit of risk. So, if you had invested in Splunk ten years ago, you're likely feeling pretty good about your investment today.

According to our calculations, a $1000 investment made in February 2013 would be worth $3,161.58, or a gain of 216.16%, as of February 9, 2023, and this return excludes dividends but includes price increases.

The S&P 500 rose 171.28% and the price of gold increased 7.95% over the same time frame in comparison.

Looking ahead, analysts are expecting more upside for SPLK.

Splunk’s performance is gaining traction from healthy customer engagement, evident from the consistently high net retention and competitive win rates alongside solid momentum with large orders overall. The company is improving the resilience and security of its critical system and driving efficiencies within its own internal operation. Also, business transition from perpetual licenses to subscription or renewable model is expected to benefit it in the long run. The company’s top line is benefiting from high demand for its cloud solutions. However, the transition to a renewable model from a perpetual license model is hurting its cash-flow generation ability due to lower upfront payment. Management expects sluggish on-premise business to hurt growth in the near term. Stiff competition and leveraged balance sheet are further concerns.

The stock is up 20.06% over the past four weeks, and no earnings estimate has gone lower in the past two months, compared to 1 higher, for fiscal 2023. The consensus estimate has moved up as well.

Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can get 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report

Splunk Inc. (SPLK) : Free Stock Analysis Report

To read this article on Zacks.com click here.

Zacks Investment Research

The early-year market rally is showing no signs of stopping, and it's a great time for investors to re-tilt their portfolios toward forgotten growth names that are ready to burst out of the gate again. In this regard look no further than Splunk (NASDAQ:SPLK), a big data software company that specializes in mining companies' internal machine data in order to generate insights.

Splunk spent much of the past two years in transition mode. It was late to the subscription game, and just recently started moving over its customers onto recurring subscription contracts instead of perpetual licenses. As expected, the company took a near-term growth hit during this transition and profitability metrics also started fraying. But now emerging from this subscription transition with tremendous growth rates in both revenue and ARR, and with the market ready to bet on growth again, Splunk is an excellent choice for a rebound play.

I remain bullish on Splunk as a core holding in my portfolio. I have long favored technology companies with broad, open-ended platforms serving countless use cases and horizontal applicability to all industries. Splunk has emerged from its two-year transition as an incredibly margin-rich company as well, which will be a major draw in a relatively more risk-averse market that has started paying more attention to tech companies' bottom lines.

Here is my full bull thesis for Splunk:

• The use cases for Splunk are infinite. In its early days, Splunk's machine data-mining capabilities were often used for security purposes to flag and respond to anomalies within corporate systems. But as Splunk has evolved, the company's machine data capabilities are applicable across virtually any industry and across many functions.

• Usage-based pricing. Some of the most successful software stocks are usage-based, meaning that revenue climbs proportionally to a customer's usage of the product. Splunk's platform is charged on a data volumes/computing power basis. As data volumes continue to explode and companies push the boundaries of how they integrate data into operations and decision-making, Splunk has a tremendous opportunity to derive growth from within its install base.

• Splunk isn't without competitors, but the company's focus on machine data is unique. It's also the largest company in the space. The company's closest large/public peers are the monitoring companies like Datadog (DDOG) and New Relic (NEWR), which primarily focus on monitoring the performance and uptime of applications and infrastructure. Splunk focuses on visualizing and analyzing machine data (information passively generated by computers, phones, and other endpoints within networks). We note as well that Splunk's ~$3.7 billion annual revenue scale makes it twice as large as its next-closest competitor, Datadog.

• Industry-wide recognition - More to the point above, it's fine to have competition when Splunk also is widely considered the best-in-breed vendor for machine data analytics. Gartner, the software industry's leading analyst and reviewer, has bestowed the "Leader" designation to Splunk in the security information and event management space, and also named it as the vendor with the highest ability to execute. These commendations don't come lightly to IT buyers when making a purchase decision.

• Significant international expansion opportunity - Splunk has become a global brand name, and it's time for Splunk to chase more opportunities overseas. Currently, only about ~35% of its revenue base comes from international markets (and an even smaller ~20% slice of the cloud business is overseas). I see significant opportunity for Splunk to expand its presence outside of the U.S.

In spite of all these strengths, Splunk's rather muted price appreciation during its subscription transition has left its valuation metrics quite sparse. At current share prices near $95, Splunk trades at a market cap of $15.60 billion. After we net off the $1.80 billion of cash and $3.87 billion of debt on Splunk's most accurate balance sheet, the company's resulting enterprise value is $17.67 billion.

For next fiscal year FY24 (the fiscal year for Splunk ending in January 2024), meanwhile, Wall Street analysts have a consensus revenue target of $4.03 billion for the company, representing 16% y/y growth (data from Yahoo Finance). This puts Splunk's valuation at just 4.4x EV/FY24 revenue, which to me is quite low for a company with 80%+ pro forma gross margins and current revenue growth rates in the ~40% range.

Stay long here, there's plenty of upside to go.

Recent trends showcase boosts in revenue and profitability

It took a lot of patience as Splunk fine-tuned its business model transition, but now we're here to reap the rewards. The company posted excellent fiscal Q3 results:

Revenue grew 40% y/y to $929.8 million, which handsomely beat Wall Street's expectations of $836.3 million (+26% y/y) by a huge fourteen-point margin. And as shown in the chart below, revenue growth accelerated sharply from 32% y/y growth in Q2. The right-hand side of the snapshot below also shows how growth has materially skyrocketed since the days of Splunk's subscription transition.

The company noted that cloud migration remained strong, though major headwinds have made some customers exert some caution. Per CEO Gary Steele's remarks on the Q3 earnings call:

Our top line outperformance was driven by strong term license demand from existing customers, underscoring the value our customers continue to gain from Splunk's mission-critical security and observability solutions powered by our one-of-a-kind data platform. That said, as noted last quarter, we continue to see caution from customers on the timing of their cloud migrations and expansions setting ongoing macro concerns."

Splunk also displayed excellent profitability results. Pro forma grow margins rose to a sky-high 72.6%, up 330bps sequentially and an increase of nearly eight points year over year:

This was driven by ongoing optimization efforts with the company's infrastructure delivery partners. In addition to gross margin boosts, Splunk also managed to exhibit extreme opex discipline, slowing down hiring, shrinking its real estate footprint, and reducing travel and entertainment to bare essentials. As a result of these actions, the company out $30 million out of its opex relative to Q2, and reduced opex by 2% y/y. With both operating leverage plus gross margin gains, the company managed to boost pro forma operating margins to 21%: more than thirty points of gain since the prior year.

Key takeaways

Rich profitability, a resurgence in growth driven by a now nearly pure recurring-revenue business, net revenue expansion rates in the ~130% range, and a wide-open $100 billion TAM to grow into - these are all of the key reasons to stay long on Splunk. Continue to bank on this stock for upward momentum.

Warren Buffett never mentions this but he is one of the first hedge fund managers who unlocked the secrets of successful stock market investing. He launched his hedge fund in 1956 with $105,100 in seed capital. Back then they weren’t called hedge funds, they were called “partnerships”. Warren Buffett took 25% of all returns in excess of 6 percent. 

For example S&P 500 Index returned 43.4% in 1958. If Warren Buffett’s hedge fund didn’t generate any outperformance (i.e. secretly invested like a closet index fund), Warren Buffett would have pocketed a quarter of the 37.4% excess return. That would have been 9.35% in hedge fund “fees”. 

Actually Warren Buffett failed to beat the S&P 500 Index in 1958, returned only 40.9% and pocketed 8.7 percentage of it as “fees”. His investors didn’t mind that he underperformed the market in 1958 because he beat the market by a large margin in 1957. That year Buffett’s hedge fund returned 10.4% and Buffett took only 1.1 percentage points of that as “fees”. S&P 500 Index lost 10.8% in 1957, so Buffett’s investors actually thrilled to beat the market by 20.1 percentage points in 1957.

Between 1957 and 1966 Warren Buffett’s hedge fund returned 23.5% annually after deducting Warren Buffett’s 5.5 percentage point annual fees. S&P 500 Index generated an average annual compounded return of only 9.2% during the same 10-year period. An investor who invested $10,000 in Warren Buffett’s hedge fund at the beginning of 1957 saw his capital turn into $103,000 before fees and $64,100 after fees (this means Warren Buffett made more than $36,000 in fees from this investor).

As you can guess, Warren Buffett’s #1 wealth building strategy is to generate high returns in the 20% to 30% range.

We see several investors trying to strike it rich in options market by risking their entire savings. You can get rich by returning 20% per year and compounding that for several years. Warren Buffett has been investing and compounding for at least 65 years.

So, how did Warren Buffett manage to generate high returns and beat the market?

In a free demo issue of our monthly newsletter we analyzed Warren Buffett’s stock picks covering the 1999-2017 period and identified the best performing stocks in Warren Buffett’s portfolio. This is basically a recipe to generate better returns than Warren Buffett is achieving himself.

You can enter your email below to get our FREE report. In the same report you can also find a detailed bonus biotech stock pick that we expect to return more than 50% within 12-24 months. We initially share this idea in October 2018 and the stock already returned more than 150%. We still like this investment.

Warren Buffet's Secret Recipe

Our Price: $199 FREE

We may use your email to send marketing emails about our services. Click here to read our privacy policy.

February 02, 2023, 05:20 PM EST

The security and observability platform developer is laying off about 325 workers with most of the cuts in North America, according to an SEC filing.

Splunk is laying off about 4 percent of its workforce or about 325 employees, the unified security and observability platform developer disclosed in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Splunk, headquartered in San Francisco, becomes the latest IT industry to undertake employee cutbacks in accurate weeks. Just this week NetApp said it is laying off about 8 percent of its global workforce while earlier today Okta informed its employees of plans to cut about 5 percent of its workforce.

Other major companies that have instituted layoffs include SAP (about 3,000 jobs), IBM (about 3,900 workers), and Microsoft (10,000 jobs).

[Related: Tech Company Layoffs In 2023: The latest Cuts In Q1]

In a Form 8-K filing with the SEC on Wednesday, Splunk disclosed a reorganization plan that will cut approximately 4 percent of the company’s global workforce, with most of the layoffs in North America.

“Today, we are making the difficult decision to reduce our global workforce by approximately 4 [percent], mostly in North America,” Splunk president and CEO Gary Steele said in a note sent to Splunk employees on Wednesday and included with the SEC filing.

“This decision is another step in a broader set of proactive organizational and strategic changes that include optimizing our processes, cost structure and how we operate globally to ensure Splunk continues to balance growth with profitability through these uncertain times and drive success over the long term,” Steele said.

“The early proactive steps we’ve taken over the past several months have minimized the scale of the changes we are making now. Unfortunately, today’s decision impacts about 325 Splunkers across the company,” his note said.

The company estimates that it will incur approximately $28 million in charges and cash expenditures to cover the costs of the layoffs, including severance payments, employee retention and transition costs, and other expenses. The company expects to complete the layoffs in the current fiscal quarter that ends April 30.

“Decisions of this nature have a significant human impact, and I don’t take that lightly. Since I joined the company, I’ve often heard the phrase ‘once a Splunker always a Splunker.’ That statement couldn’t be more true than it is today,” Steel said in his note. “The people leaving the company are our fellow Splunkers, our friends, and have helped drive our success. I want to express my gratitude for the important contributions they’ve made to Splunk and to our customers,” he said.

“Looking ahead, we will continue to invest in the areas that got us to where we are today – including how we engage with customers, our innovation and our talent. This will include the select recruiting of new Splunkers in FY24, consistent with our focus on accessing global talent in lower-cost areas. At the same time, we will continually assess our organizational health, where and how we work, and how we deploy our team and resources to deliver customer and shareholder value,” Steele said.

The note also said that Splunk will decrease its reliance on “external resources,” such as agencies and consultants, to reduce costs.

News of the layoffs come as Splunk just closed out its fourth quarter and fiscal 2023 on Tuesday, Jan. 31. For the first three quarters (ended Oct. 31, 2022) of fiscal 2023 Splunk reported revenue of just over $2.40 billion, up nearly 36 percent from $1.77 billion in the first three quarters of fiscal 2022. The company also significantly cut its net losses to $546.7 million in the first three quarters of fiscal 2023 from $1.20 billion in the first three quarters of fiscal 2022.

Splunk’s shares closed at $106.99 Thursday, up 7.2 percent for the day and up more than 11 percent from Wednesday’s $96.15 opening price before the company’s SEC filing.

In October activist investor Starboard Value announced that it had acquired a stake in Splunk of just under 5 percent. In June 2021 private equity giant Silver Lake made a $1 billion convertible investment in the company and in early 2022 private equity firm Hellman & Friedman bought a 7.5 percent stake in Splunk.

Splunk’s executive ranks have undergone significant changes over the last 18 months. Steele took over as president and CEO in April 2022, replacing former CEO Doug Merritt who stepped down in November 2021. Sharyl Givens was hired as chief people officer in October 2022 and just last week the company announced the appointment of Brian Roberts, a former Lyft, Microsoft and Walmart executive, as the company’s new CFO.

CRN reached out to Splunk for additional comment, including whether the layoffs will impact the company’s channel operations, and a spokesperson provided the following statement:

“Splunk regularly assesses how our resources align to the evolving needs of our business. We’ve made the difficult decision to reduce our team by approximately 4 [percent], mostly in North America. This decision is another step in a broader set of proactive changes we’ve made over the past several months to ensure Splunk continues to balance growth with profitability through these uncertain times and drive success over the long term.”

Analysts have provided the following ratings for Splunk (NASDAQ:SPLK) within the last quarter:

These 14 analysts have an average price target of $106.71 versus the current price of Splunk at $99.8, implying upside.

Below is a summary of how these 14 analysts rated Splunk over the past 3 months. The greater the number of bullish ratings, the more positive analysts are on the stock and the greater the number of bearish ratings, the more negative analysts are on the stock

This current average has decreased by 9.24% from the previous average price target of $117.58.

Stay up to date on Splunk analyst ratings.

Benzinga tracks 150 analyst firms and reports on their stock expectations. Analysts typically arrive at their conclusions by predicting how much money a company will make in the future, usually the upcoming five years, and how risky or predictable that company's revenue streams are.

Analysts attend company conference calls and meetings, research company financial statements, and communicate with insiders to publish their ratings on stocks. Analysts typically rate each stock once per quarter or whenever the company has a major update.

Some analysts will also offer forecasts for metrics like growth estimates, earnings, and revenue to provide further guidance on stocks. Investors who use analyst ratings should note that this specialized advice comes from humans and may be subject to error.

This article was generated by Benzinga's automated content engine and reviewed by an editor.

Splunk Inc. intends to lay off about 4% of its staff as cutbacks in the software industry intensify.

The move will impact about 325 employees at Splunk SPLK, -1.95%, mainly in North America.

Splunk joined the growing list of tech companies announcing layoffs in an attempt to cut costs.

Splunk (ticker: SPLK) announced in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday that it will be reducing its global workforce by about 4%, or around 325 employees. Most of the layoffs would be in North America, Splunk said.

Investment bank KeyBanc Capital Markets upgraded Splunk (NASDAQ:SPLK) and downgraded Datadog (NASDAQ:DDOG) on Monday as the research firm said it is getting "increasingly selective" on cloud software stocks, citing the potential for a "meaningful" slowdown this year.

Citing a fourth-quarter survey that showed lowered IT growth expectations for 2023, analyst Michael Turits raised his rating on Splunk (SPLK) to overweight from sector weight and cut Datadog (DDOG) to sector weight from overweight.

"During the last 2 quarters, slowing has spread even to cloud, potentially impacting a range of 'cloud enablers' in observability, data, and devops; and to security as well, if less than IT overall and with consolidators benefiting," Turits wrote in a note to clients.

Regarding Splunk (SPLK), Turits said the company has performed better under new CEO Gary Steele and made a "smooth transition" to being a multi-tenant cloud, as evidenced by better gross margins and improvement on more customer-friendly workload pricing.

Turits added Splunk's (SPLK) "pervasive enterprise presence" and entrenched position in security and data and analytics in a tough spending environment is a positive. It has also performed strongly in both on-premise and off-premise spending.

Under Steele, who took over in April 2022, Splunk (SPLK) has continued to increase its efficiency and become cash flow profitable, along with a continued refocus on its core security business.

"Plus, while chatter has existed for many years regarding Splunk as a takeout target, we continue to see private market value support for the stock at 4.4x revenues vs. 5.1x accurate infrastructure takeout multiples," Turits added.

Splunk (SPLK) shares rose more than 1% in premarket trading on Monday.

Turits downgraded Datadog (DDOG) citing the continued worsening macroeconomic conditions seen in December, the expected continuation, at least for the first half of 2023, as well as decelerating growth in the cloud, as evidenced by Microsoft's (MSFT) weak guidance for Azure.

The analyst also noted that there may be issues for Datadog (DDOG) generating higher margins, due to increases in sales and R&D investments to keep its high revenue growth.

As such, he lowered his 2023 and 2024 estimated revenue growth rates to 32% and 30% year-over-year, down from 35% and 30% year-over-year.

Datadog (DDOG) declined 3.1% to $77 in premarket trading on Monday.

Earlier this month, Splunk (SPLK) said it would reduce roughly 4% of its global workforce, mostly in North America, as part of a reorganization to optimize its processes and cost structure.

Analysts are largely bullish on Splunk (SPLK). It has a BUY rating from Seeking Alpha authors, while Wall Street analysts rate it a BUY. Conversely, Seeking Alpha's quant system, which consistently beats the market, rates SPLK a HOLD.