Update: The stock finished the day up 108% from its IPO price.
Enterprise data company Splunk IPO'd today and demand was nuts.
It was looking at a range of $11-$13, but it was priced at $17, raising $230 million.
When it started trading it opened at $32 and then shot up to $38 before trading was halted.
Once trading started up again, it was back to $32 range.
Splunk works in a really interesting big data niche. It gathers up all the data from a company's own internal machines -- as well as some external stuff like Twitter -- and sifts through it to find patterns. Splunk says this can be used to help troubleshoot, or even predict, application performance problems.
Meaning, you know those times when some IT system keeps going down and IT is tearing its hair out to fix it but nothing works? That's one of the things it helps with. Or it can help figure out if someone hacked into a computer system, what kind of damage was done (security forensics).
Splunk's technology isn't built on Hadoop, like other big data players (Cloudera, MapR Technologies, Hortonworks). It processes less data than Hadoop, but faster. Splunk calls itself a "pipeline" compared to Hadoop's "batch processing." But it can also be used with Hadoop -- and that's one of the reasons it has become so popular.
According to the company's S1 filing, Splunk had over 3,700 customers at the start of 2012, many in the Fortune 100 but also up-and-commers. Its customer list includes Autodesk, Bank of America, Comcast, Etsy, Harvard University, Viacom and Zynga.
It's fiscal 2010, 2011 and 2012, revenues were $35.0 million, $66.2 million and $121.0 million, respectively, representing year-over-year growth of 89% for fiscal 2011 and 83% for fiscal 2012. It's net loss was $7.5 million, $3.8 million and $11.0 million, respectively.
Enterprise big data companies are coming out of the woodwork these days. VCs like Accel and Google Ventures are particularly seeking out young big data companies. And startups like Symplified are watching how Splunk does before they launch their own IPOs.
