I believe they said the TAM came from a data analysis…maybe external?
Yeah, like I said.
…they’d be at 18,700 instead of 20,000.
So they go from 500/quarter to 600/quarter. For a company without profits yet, that’s a yawn, no?
…there’s no reason to think large orders won’t ramp along with the customers they are adding and retaining
OK, but nothing shows big growth, and nothing shows profitability on the near term horizon. They have costs switching from the onPrem to Hosted model. Seems like even they admit it’s at least 3 years before they hit that “inflection point” and a lot can happen in 3 years, like competition.
I honestly think they’re just being really conservative and that they’ll beat it handily, but even if not, the reason I’m excited is that it sounds like they’re building a great network of long-term customers which are increasing their spend and finding new uses for Splunk all the time.
Splunk’s a cool tool for some things - we played around with it at my previous company, but frankly the costs were simply far too high for us as a small company. As a customer, you end up pre-filtering your data since Splunk charges by how much data you put through it. And once you go through the trouble of pre-filtering you end just continuing along and doing most analysis outside of Splunk. If you’ve got some weird issue, you’ll fire it up, but for normal day to day analysis, Splunk is just too expensive.
Splunk is great at data mining, looking for trends or systemic problems that you haven’t seen before. Essentially, you slice and dice the data in different ways, looking graphically for anomalies or outliers. It probably does even more than that, but that was its main use for us.
BTW, a similar product at a different scale, Platfora, was recently acquired by Workday. And there’s also Tableau in a similar space.