Technology Sector Ideas

[gfp927z]

>>> Splunk (SPLK) -


http://money.msn.com/top-stocks/8-tech-stocks-worth-a-look



Headquarters: San Francisco
Price: $43.85
Market capitalization: $5.1 billion
52-week range: $39.35 - $106.15
Annual sales: $302.6 million
Estimated earnings growth: Not meaningful (company is losing money)

Named after a sport that involves digging through caves, Splunk (SPLK) dives into the vast and often murky performance data produced by corporate machinery. By capturing the incessant clamor of machine error messages and electronically sorting through and identifying the ones that are meaningful, Splunk's software effectively gets corporate machinery to tell their owners when something is broken. That has drastically reduced the time it takes to find and fix system errors, says Derrick Wood, an analyst with Susquehanna Financial Group. And it has made Splunk one of the hottest properties on Wall Street.

The company is now using its technological know-how to figure out when hackers are trying to attack its customers' computer networks. Splunk "has fantastic technology that helps customers solve real problems," says Morningstar analyst Norman Young.

Like many of the other hot upstarts, Splunk is not yet profitable, but analysts expect the company to produce black ink in the quarter that ends in October 2014. Splunk shares have fallen 57 percent since late February. Although Young thinks the stock is worth $54, he suggests that investors wait for the shares to fall into the $30s before pouncing.

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>>> Splunk, Inc. provides software solutions that provide real-time operational intelligence in the United States and internationally. It offers Splunk Enterprise, a machine data engine with collection, indexing, search, reporting analysis, and data management capabilities that allows dynamic schema creation on the fly, enabling users to run queries on data without having to understand the structure of the data prior to collection and indexing; and Splunk Cloud service, which delivers the functionalities of Splunk Enterprise as a cloud service, as well as develops and sells apps, such as the Splunk App for Enterprise Security and the Splunk App for VMware. The company also provides Splunk Storm, a service offered as a self-provisioned service for cloud-based developers; and Hunk, a Splunk Analytics for Hadoop, for interactively exploring, analyzing, and visualizing data stored in Hadoop. In addition, it offers services, such as maintenance and customer support, training, and consulting and implementation services. The company serves cloud and online services, education, energy and utilities, financial services, government, healthcare/pharmaceuticals, industrials/manufacturing, media/entertainment, retail/ecommerce, technology, telecommunications, and travel and transportation industries. Splunk, Inc. was incorporated in 2003 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. <<<