Tag Archives: crm

5 Hot Tech Stocks You Should Be Watching Ahead Of Earnings

Loading the player… Quarterly earnings reports almost always impact a company’s stock, whether good or bad. Here’s a look at five hot tech names with earnings due for you to keep an eye on: Fibit ( FIT ), NetEase ( NTES ), WebMD ( WBMD ), First Solar ( FSLR ) and Salesforce ( CRM ). Fitbit reports after the close on Monday. Analysts expect the bottom line to climb 32%, a healthy rise but still a second quarter of decelerating growth. Revenue is projected to pop 75%. Fitbit competes against the Apple ( AAPL ) Watch, and both were named hot gift items during the holiday quarter. Fitbit shares are trading below their IPO price of 20, and are trying to make their way off of their all-time low reached last week. The stock is trading nearly 70% below its all-time high reached last August. NetEase is projected to grow earnings by 52% in local currency when it reports after the close on Wednesday. Revenue is estimated to jump 121%. The stock was able to retake its 200-day line earlier this week. It’s trading about 17% below a potential buy point. NetEase is a member of the IBD 50 list of leading stocks, and so is WebMD. The health care information site is expected to see earnings jump 58% and sales rise 17% when it reports after the close on Tuesday. Both mark an acceleration of growth from last quarter. WebMD is currently trading about 8% below its intraday peak reached in mid-January. First Solar is not on the IBD 50 list, but it earns an IBD Composite Rating of 97 out of 99. The company reports its results after the close on Tuesday as well. Earnings are expected to fall 59% on an 8% dip in sales. The stock is working on a consolidation base and is currently trading about 13% below the pivot. And software giant Salesforce reports after the close on Wednesday. Earnings are expected to jump 36%, while revenue rises 24%. Shares have risen seven out of the last eight sessions as they work their way higher from about a 16-month low. Salesforce is about 25% below its November high.

Zendesk Stock Rises On Q4 Top-Line Beat, Keeps Adding Customers

Zendesk ( ZEN ) stock rose Wednesday after the cloud software vendor late Tuesday posted Q4 results that beat on the top line and met on the bottom line. The company reported Q4 revenue of $62.6 million, up 63% year over year and topping the consensus estimate of $60 million. It reported a per-share loss of 7 cents, matching the consensus estimate, as polled by Thomson Reuters. It reported a per-share loss of 11 cents in the year earlier quarter. Zendesk provides a cloud-based customer service software platform used primarily by small- to medium-size businesses. Its competitors include cloud software pioneer Salesforce.com ( CRM ), the leading maker of customer relationship management software. Zendesk stock was up 6%, near 17, in afternoon trading in the stock market today . Its shares, along with those of Salesforce.com and other enterprise software makers, tumbled on Feb. 5 after weak guidance by Tableau Software ( DATA ) raised fears of slower tech spending. Salesforce.com stock was up 5.5% Wednesday afternoon, and Tableau stock was up 3.5%. Zendesk finished Q4 with more than 69,000 customer accounts, up 7.8% from 64,000 in Q3. The company has a goal to reach $1 billion in revenue in 2020. “We are aggressively developing products and markets that move us beyond our core in customer support and into emerging opportunities around customer relationships.” Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane said in the company’s earnings release. In November, Zendesk announced a partnership with Microsoft ( MSFT ), integrating its software with Microsoft Office 365. It was the first customer-service add-in for Microsoft Outlook, which is part of the Office 365 suite. Zendesk also is working with Facebook ( FB ) to add Facebook Messenger to its suite of applications. It would enable call centers to use Facebook Messenger to communicate with customers and prospects. Facebook Messenger could add $100 million in revenue, estimates Brendan Barnicle, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities. Barnicle maintained an overweight rating on Zendesk and a price target of 35. Ross MacMillan, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, maintained an outperform rating on Zendesk and a price target of 27. Zendesk expects Q1 revenue of $65 million to $67 million. The midpoint would be up 66% from the year-ago quarter. It sees an operating loss of $8 million to $9 million. For 2016, Zendesk expects revenue of $290 million to $300 million, up 41% at the midpoint, and an operating loss of $28 million to $30 million.  

Amazon Customers Confirm: Cloud Transition Still Biggest Trend

After tracking down top tech execs of 10 Amazon Web Services customers and nine AWS “premier consulting partners” for interviews, Deutsche Bank analysts came away convinced that the migration to the cloud is still “the biggest and most disruptive trend in the enterprise IT market today.” Aside from “assessing macroeconomic risks to 2016 IT budgets (as) the topic du jour,” many tech execs are slowing their IT spending as they prepare to move their enterprises to the cloud, said Deutsche Bank analyst Karl Keirstead in a research note Tuesday. Keirstead questioned whether the macro headwinds that many blame for the current softness in tech spending are really at fault. “Even Tableau Software ( DATA ) cited this phenomenon,” he wrote. Tableau stock notoriously gapped down 49.5% Feb. 5, spooking investors and dragging many software stocks with it, after offering 2016 guidance that missed Wall Street expectations. Tableau stock, down a fraction, near 40, in afternoon trading in the stock market today , is more than 50% off its Feb. 4 close and 70% below its all-time high above 131 set last July. Amazon ( AMZN ) stock was up 2.5% in afternoon trading Tuesday, near 520 and 25% off its all-time high of 696.44 set in December. The runway is still enormous for cloud migration. Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s ( MSFT ) Azure and Alphabet’s ( GOOGL ) Google Cloud Platform combined have grown revenue to about $10 billion annually, a “tiny penetration” of the $500 billion to $1 trillion spent annually on tech services and products, Keirstead said. “The trend to AWS is clear … as more and more large enterprises are shuttering private data centers in a quest to become ‘data center independent’ and younger and smaller customers are piggy-backing on AWS as a faster and cheaper way to scale up in new geographies,” he wrote. Neutral Toward Oracle, Security Vendors The big legacy IT infrastructure vendors are feeling the brunt of the migration, he said. Those interviewed were “cautious” toward managed hosting and colocation data center vendors, neutral toward enterprise software developer Oracle ( ORCL ) and neutral (not negative)  toward security vendors because “most” customers won’t rely only on AWS security, Keirstead says. “It was a mixed  bag for Red Hat ( RHT ), as several of the ‘all-in’ customers seemed content to move to Amazon’s own Linux distribution,” he wrote. He said feedback was “bullish” on software-as-a-service companies  Salesforce.com ( CRM ) and Workday ( WDAY ). “We now wonder if AWS is creating a tailwind for the SaaS (Software as a Service) vendors … and if the IT services vendors could get a lift as enterprises look to move or re-platform workloads to make them more cloud-friendly,” Keirstead mused. Deutsche Bank maintains buy ratings on Microsoft, Salesforce and Amazon.  Salesforce is expected after the close Feb. 24 to report earnings up 36% for the January quarter. Salesforce stock was down a fraction Tuesday afternoon, near 59 and 29% off a Nov. 19 all-time high at 82.90. Rival Workday stock was up 2.5% Tuesday afternoon, near 50.50, still 48% off nearly two-year high set in October 2014. It’s scheduled Feb. 29 to report an adjusted loss of 4 cents per share for its fiscal Q4 ended in January, vs. 6 cents lost in Q4 a year earlier. Keirstead said he doesn’t doubt that macro pressure is “keeping a lid on infrastructure IT spending,” but big legacy players Cisco Systems ( CSCO ), IBM ( IBM ) and EMC ( EMC ) “have cited a ‘tough macro’ seemingly every quarter for 12-plus months, he says. “It is entirely plausible that the ongoing weakness in technology capex, private data center build-outs and hardware refresh activity is also due to ongoing structural shifts as large enterprises rethink their IT infrastructures to prepare for a transition to the public cloud model.”