Photo Credit: Ted Striker/Flickr.com

According to IDC, the worldwide revenues for Big Data and business analytics are expected to grow 12% annually to $260 billion in 2022. The growth is expected to be driven by the banking, manufacturing, professional services, and government sectors. More than half of all revenues will be driven by IT and business services with services-related revenue being the fastest growing segment. Recently, big data platform Splunk (Nasdaq: SPLK) announced its fourth-quarter results that surpassed market expectations.

Splunk’s Financials

Revenues for the fourth quarter grew 35% over the year to $622.1 million, significantly ahead of the market’s expectations of $561 million. It ended the quarter with an adjusted EPS of $0.93 that grew 41% over the year and surpassed market expectations of $0.76.

By segment, Splunk’s software revenues grew 38% to $411 million. Maintenance and services revenues grew 30% to $211.1 million.

During the quarter, fourth-quarter remaining performance obligation grew 57% to $1.3 billion. Cloud revenues grew 85% to $53 million. It added more than 600 new enterprise customers in the quarter and reported nearly 180 orders of $1 million in the quarter.

Splunk ended the year with revenues growing 38% to $1.8 billion and a loss of $1.89 per share. Net losses have grown from $190.2 million a year ago to $275.6 million due to higher expenses for research on new products and headcount to support sales. R&D spend increased 47% to $442 million and sales and marketing expenses grew 32% to $1.03 billion.

For the current quarter, Splunk expects revenues of $395 million, compared with the market’s estimate of $392.9 million. It expects to end the current year with revenues of $2.2 billion, compared with $2.16 billion forecast a quarter ago.

Splunk’s Partner Expansion

Splunk has been driving growth for its products by expanding its partner network. Last year, it deepened its relationship with Amazon with the release of integrations with Amazon Web Services Security Hub. AWS Security Hub offers a comprehensive view to manage security alerts and automate compliance checks for AWS customers. Splunk has integrated its Enterprise and Phantom offerings with the AWS Security Hub to help customers accelerate detection, investigation, and response to potential threats within their AWS security environment. Using the integration, customers will be able to take an analytics-driven approach to security and scale their security operations through automation. Splunk is also building the ability to leverage Amazon CloudWatch Events to provide customers with data directly from AWS Security Hub. This will enable customers to monitor and identify potential threats across AWS Security products directly in the Splunk platform.

Meanwhile, Splunk remains focused on its platform strategy. Its platform has been open to third-party developers allowing them to develop cloud-native Splunk apps for real-time, machine-generated Big Data applications. Developers can build capabilities to integrate Splunk with line-of-business systems like customer service applications, integrate data and visualizations from Splunk into BI and reporting tools and then extend Splunk with custom search commands and scripted lookups, search macros, modular inputs and data models.

Today, its platform offers over a thousand apps and add-ons that help organizations with issues ranging from security, fraud, and compliance with business analytics. Splunk is also helping these developers with monetization and licensing of apps that integrate data and workflow and reach Splunk users around the world on Splunkbase. I would like to know from the developers what other apps are they building for Splunk? What apps do they think have gained significant traction?

Its stock is trading at $129.55 with a market capitalization of $19.15 billion. It had climbed to a 52-week high of $143.70 last month and has recovered from the 52-week low of $83.69 in October last year.

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