Posts tagged ‘$N’

Jul 9

Best- And Worst-Performing Cloud Computing Stocks In The First Half Of 2013

Cloud computing stocks continue to show wide variation in performance throughout the first half of this year.

Ten of the twenty companies in the Cloud Computing Stock Index delivered returns to shareholders with NetSuite leading with a 37.30% share gain, delivering $13,730 on $10,000 invested on January 2, 2013.

To more fully define the stock performance of these companies, I’ve added Earnings Per Share (EPS), Price/Earnings Ratio, Year-To-Date (YTD) Total Gains or Loss, Annualized Gain or Loss, and Total Dollar Value of $10,000 invested on January 2, 2013. You can download the latest version of the Cloud Computing Stock Index here. The filter applied to these companies is that 50% or more of their revenues are generated from cloud-based applications, infrastructure and services. Additional details of the index are provided at the end of this post.

Best Performing

Name	Symbol	(1/2/13 – 7/5/13)Total Gain or Loss	Annualized Gain or Loss	Total Dollar Value of $10K invested in this stock on Jan. 2, 2013 as of July 5th:
NetSuite Inc	N	37.30%	87.55%	$13,730.00
Keynote Systems, Inc.	KEYN	36.18%	84.53%	$13,618.00
CA, Inc.	CA	26.67%	59.83%	$12,667.00
Workday Inc	WDAY	23.81%	52.77%	$12,381.00
Cisco Systems, Inc.	CSCO	22.60%	49.82%	$12,260.00
Symantec Corporation	SYMC	18.84%	40.84%	$11,884.00
Amazon.com, Inc.	AMZN	11.10%	23.23%	$11,110.00

Worst Performing

Name	Symbol	(1/2/13 – 7/5/13)Total Gain or Loss	Annualized Gain or Loss	Total Dollar Value of $10K invested in this stock on Jan. 2, 2013 as of July 5th:
Rackspace Hosting, Inc.	RAX	-46.78%	-71.39%	$5,322.00
Fusion-IO, Inc.	FIO	-41.21%	-65.13%	$5,879.00
F5 Networks, Inc.	FFIV	-31.57%	-52.88%	$6,843.00
VMware, Inc.	VMW	-29.94%	-50.63%	$7,006.00
Riverbed Technology…	RVBD	-24.91%	-43.34%	$7,509.00
Red Hat, Inc.	RHT	-11.47%	-21.46%	$8,853.00

Key Take-Aways:

NetSuite leads the index with a 37.3% gain in their stock price, and $10K invested in their stock on January 2^nd of this year would be worth $13,730 as of July 5^th. Cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems acceptance is accelerating, evidenced by the success NetSuite is having with their two-tier ERP strategy and recent announcement they are moving into manufacturing. Their recent alliance with Oracle also shows upside potential. A cloud-based ERP provider leading the index is good news for Acumatica and Plex Systems especially, the leader in cloud-based ERP systems for manufacturing and one of the most enthusiastic customer bases in enterprise software. Both of these companies are privately held or they would have been included in the index.

The 20 companies that comprise the Cloud Computing Stock Index attained a 29.6% return from July 10, 2012 to July 5, 2013. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) gained 18.83%; Microsoft, 14.02%; Oracle, 7.17%; and SAP, 27.51%. The following chart compares the performance of each. Please click on the index to expand it for easier viewing.

Widespread adoption of Amazon Web Services, success using the Kindle series of tablets as customer acquisition tools for digital content, market leadership of the online retail landscape, and successful pilots of the AmazonFresh online grocery business in Los Angeles and Seattle are all fueling Amazon’s stock performance this year.

Specifics on the Cloud Computing Stock Index

I used The Cloud Times 100 as the basis of the index, and included the 20 following companies, all of which are publically traded. The latest edition of the Cloud Computing Stock Index is shown here. Please click on the index to expand it for easier viewing.

Note: I do not hold equity positions or work for any of the companies mentioned in this blog post or included in the Cloud Computing Stock Index.

Apr 24

3 Comments

Why Cloud Computing is Accelerating in the Enterprise

Translating time into dollars matters far more to many CEOs I’ve spoken with versus what platform their applications are running on.

What matters most is getting all they can out of every hour their business is operating. They are all focused on getting beyond the constraints that held their growth back in the past – everyone wants a growth accelerator today. For manufacturers especially, this includes applications with depth of functionality that can be quickly deployed regionally, and in more cases than ever, globally as well. Line-of-business leaders want applications that make an immediate impact on their entire value chain.

Just having a cloud strategy is not enough for any enterprise software company anymore. Owning the pain prospects and customers go through daily to get work done is all that matters. Every application and platform component needs to contribute to the goal of reducing customer’s challenges of doing business. In studying companies who excel at this, I’ve often used stock market indices to see how they compare to market averages and their competitors.

Charting Progress Using the Cloud Computing Stock Index

Creating and using stock indices to track the performance of specific industry and market sectors is a great way to cut through hype. I’ve been using these for over a decade to track industries and markets of interest, and have built the Cloud Computing Stock Index. You can download the latest summary here. If there are companies you think need to be included please let me know. I deliberately left out IBM, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP as a prerequisite is that a firm derive at least 50% or greater revenue from cloud-based applications and services.

The graph below shows all-time performance of the Cloud Computing Index relative to Microsoft, Salesforce.com. NetSuite and Workday.

Key Take Aways

NetSuite posted a 62.6% increase in stock performance, followed by Workday (+20.57%), Salesforce (+4.23%) and the Cloud Computing Index (+4%) with Microsoft seeing a 8.18% decline in share price during the period.

NetSuite, Salesforce and Workday continue to gain new customers in the mid-tier and enterprise areas of the market based on depth of functionality, rapid application development (RAD), and increasing success creating alliances with system integration, selling and technology partners.

Workday’s expertise in Human Capital Management is accentuated by the depth of analytics and trend analysis and expertise in cloud-based integrations. Their depth of functional expertise in these areas is leading to rapid growth.

NetSuite is succeeding with its two-tier ERP selling strategy against long-standing ERP vendors including Oracle, SAP and others.

Bottom line: Salesforce, NetSuite and Workday show how developing cloud-based applications designed for ease of use and speed of deployment are winning new customers in the enterprise – and driving up their stock price as a result.

Specifics on the Cloud Computing Stock Index

I used The Cloud Times 100 as the basis of the index, and included the 23 following companies, all of which are publically traded. These include: