Splunk reports strong Q4, ups outlook after Phantom deal

Machine data analytics company Splunk reported a strong fourth quarter and delivered a better-than-expected outlook for the fiscal year ahead.

Splunk reported a fourth quarter net loss of $25.07 million, or 18 cents a share, on revenue of $419.7 million, up 37 percent from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings for the fourth quarter were 37 cents a share.

Wall Street was expecting Splunk to report fourth quarter earnings of 33 cents a share on revenue of $390.1 million.

Splunk buys security orchestration provider Phantom for $350 million

The company, which announced the acquisition of Phantom this week, reported fiscal 2018 net loss of $259.1 million, or $1.85 a share, on revenue of $1.27 billion, up 34 percent from the previous year.

During the quarter, Splunk said it added 570 new enterprise customers.

As for the outlook, Splunk projected first quarter revenue between $295 million and $298 million and fiscal 2019 sales of about $1.625 billion.

CEO Doug Merritt said on a conference call:

Our growth continues to come from a combination of new and existing customers, expanding their deployments both on-prem and in the cloud. And we exited the year with 115,000 customers. I'd also like to thank our partners from around the world who joined us at our sales kickoff.

Organizations are increasingly using machine data to provide critical context to the transactional data they store in their databases and data warehouses.