Tag Archives: emc

Pure Storage Maintains Hot Streak As Q4 Earnings, Q1 Outlook Beat

Pure Storage ( PSTG ) kept its string of triple-digit revenue growth alive and posted fourth-quarter earnings after the close Wednesday that beat Wall Street estimates, as did its Q1 outlook. Pure Storage reported revenue of $150.2 million, up 128% from the year-earlier quarter and soundly beating the consensus estimate of $138.6 million. It was the ninth quarter in a row of triple-digit gains. The company reported a per-share loss minus items of 12 cents, vs. the consensus estimate for a 16-cent loss, as polled by Thomson Reuters, for the period ended Jan. 31. Pure Storage stock, which rose 5% to 15.71 in regular trading, was up another 5% in after-hours trading, after the company released its earnings. For Q1, Pure Storage forecast revenue of $135 million to $139 million, above the $130.5 million analyst consensus. For the year, Pure Storage expects revenue of $685 million to $725 million. The consensus is $667 million. “We delivered our best ever quarter in Q4, concluding another record setting year for Pure Storage,” company CEO Scott Dietzen said in the earnings release . “The business continues to run on all cylinders, fueled by the rapid worldwide adoption of FlashArray combined with improved operating efficiency as we scale.” The company grew its customer base by more than 120% over the past year to more than 1,650 organizations, it said. Pure Storage provides flash-chip-based storage systems for the enterprise market, a cutting-edge technology that is making life difficult for storage leaders EMC ( EMC ) and NetApp ( NTAP ). CEO Dietzen says that the data storage industry is on the cusp of a revolutionary change that Pure aims to lead. But a recent report from Summit Research said that while Pure Storage has cutting-edge data technology, it will face an uphill battle trying to dislodge EMC and NetApp.

Pure Storage Riding Hot Spell Into Its Q4 Earnings Report Today

Pure Storage ( PSTG ) stock was up for the fifth day in a row ahead of its fourth-quarter earnings set for release today after the close. Pure Storage is a provider of flash-chip-based storage systems for the enterprise market, a cutting-edge technology that is making life difficult for storage leaders EMC ( EMC )and NetApp ( NTAP ). Pure Storage CEO Scott Dietzen says the data storage industry is on the cusp of a revolutionary change that it aims to lead. He says Pure Storage is one of the fastest-growing tech companies in history. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company launched its first product in May 2012 and has posted triple-digit revenue growth for at least eight quarters in a row. Make that nine, if Pure Storage holds onto its brisk revenue-growth pace. The consensus estimate of analysts polled by Thomson Reuters call for Q4 revenue of $138.6 million, up 110% from the year-earlier quarter. But that rapid growth has come at a cost, as Pure Storage is pouring big sums into sales and marketing, and research and development, in an aggressive bid to expand market share. The company is expected to post a loss of 16 cents a share, compared with a 25-cent loss last Q4. Pure Storage stock was up 1.2%, near 15, in afternoon trading in the stock market today , and Wednesday touched its 2016 high. Pure Storage made its initial public offering in October, raising $425 million by pricing 25 million shares at 17. A recent report from Summit Research said that while Pure Storage has cutting-edge data technology, it will face an uphill battle trying to dislodge EMC and NetApp. EMC on Feb. 29 announced new products that it called “a quantum leap in flash storage.” EMC said it will commit to all-flash for its primary storage offerings, “relegating traditional disk to bulk and archive storage requirements.” In October, EMC has agreed to be acquired by Dell for $67 billion, a deal that is not yet completed. In December, NetApp announced that it will pay $870 million in cash to acquire SolidFire, a provider of storage systems that are based on flash-memory chips.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Still Wrestles With Cisco, Juniper

One day before Hewlett Packard Enterprise ( HPE ) was slated to post fiscal Q1 earnings, the stock of half of the old computing pioneer Hewlett-Packard Co. was up 4% in afternoon trading in the stock market today . The stock was doing what analysts expect it to do, outperforming the other half of the legacy company,   HP Inc. ( HPQ ), whose shares were up a fraction this afternoon. The stocks, of course, reflect the market’s interpretation of the companies’ operational performance since splitting into two from the legacy corporation in November.  HP, which reported earnings last week, kept the PC and printer businesses — and the old HPQ ticker. Hewlett Packard Enterprise kept the server, storage, networking, enterprise-software and cloud-migration businesses, seen as faster-growing endeavors, and kept the CEO, Meg Whitman, who still chairs both companies. Hardware and equipment-product sales comprise about 38% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise revenue, with services generating the rest. For the quarter ended Jan . 31, analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expect HPE to report earnings down 17% to 40 cents per share on revenue down 2.7% to $12.68 billion, vs. a pro forma 48 cents on $13.03 billion in the 2015 Q1. The company reports after the market close. HP Inc.’s Q1 EPS and sales each fell 12%, to 36 cents and $12.2 billion. For its first fiscal year ending in October, Hewlett Packard Enterprise expects EPS minus items of $1.85-$1.95, up from the $1.84 pro forma earned in 2015, on revenue of $50.81 billion, down 2.5% from the pro forma $52.12 billion of 2015. Analysts have modeled $1.87 and $50.73 billion. “We like HPE because decent execution should be sufficient to move the stock higher,” said UBS analyst Steven Milunovich in a February research note.  “We believe growth in servers, networking and storage, stabilization in high-margin technology services and continued improvement in the Enterprise Services margin should help close the gap between the current P/E of 7x and our target of 10x. “Storage head Manish Goel, as well as a few of our industry sources, say that HPE is taking business from Dell/ EMC ( EMC ) during their proposed merge.  Still, we think it’s time for Meg Whitman to provide a vision for the company. IBM ( IBM ) has cognitive computing.  What does hardware-heavy HPE want to be in 3-5 years and what will be its differentiation?” Nomura doesn’t cover HPE, analyst James Chen advised IBD Wednesday, but he and colleague Jeffrey Kvaal are watching closely as HPE competes with companies that Nomura does cover, such as  Cisco Systems ( CSCO ),  Juniper Networks ( JNPR ) and Arista Networks ( ANET ). Nomura said he expects 3% sales growth for HPE’s enterprise group this fiscal year, compared with Cisco and Juniper’s guidance ranges of 3% to 6%. Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s “projected growth rates are not likely to threaten networking incumbents, but don’t imply much share loss either,” the Nomura analysts said in a research note. HPE’s hybrid cloud business competes with IBM, Microsoft ‘s ( MSFT ) Azure, Amazon ( AMZN ) Web Services and Alphabet ‘s ( GOOGL ) Google Cloud Platform services. Big Data startup  Hortonworks ( HDP ), the Hadoop developer, on Tuesday said it would collaborate with HPE on the use of Apache Spark, making use of shared memory in HPE enterprise environments. UBS analyst Mulinovich, in his February note, said that “upon the split we argued in favor of HPE over HPQ stock. . . .  Hewlett Packard Enterprise has momentum with expected slight revenue growth in constant currency and an improving operating margin in fiscal 2016.” Wednesday afternoon, Hewlett Packard Enterprise stock was 13% off its Dec. 1 record high of 15.88, while HP Inc. was 26% off its record high of 14.82, set Nov. 24.