initial public offerings (IPOs) trading on American exchanges

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Splunk (SPLK) started trading on the NASDAQ on April 19, 2012

Splunk (SPLK) is a big data analytics company. Splunk’s software collects and indexes data regardless of format or source, and enables users to search, correlate, analyze, monitor and report on this data, all in real time.

Splunk, based in San Francisco, is a six-year-old software company that helps customers search and analyze data from applications to mobile devices. The 500-person company is led by Chief Executive Godfrey Sullivan, a technology executive with 30 years of experience. Sullivan, 58 years old, had seemingly already reached the peak of his career when he sold Hyperion to Oracle for $3.3 billion. But he decided to take another run at turning a small company into a heavyweight. "After Hyperion, I played about three rounds of golf and realized I wasn't ready to join the graveyard of ex-CEOs," he told Bloomberg yesterday.

His 7.1% stake in Splunk is now worth about $243 million, The Wall Street Journal reports. While the company lost $11 million in its most recent fiscal year, Sullivan has won praise for boosting revenue thirteen-fold since he took over four years ago, to $121 million from $9.07 million.

Now that the company is flush with cash, it plans to hire. Sullivan told Fortune Splunk plans to hire at least 200 additional engineers. While the prospect of IPO riches is gone, if Splunk can make money from big data, new employees will reap rewards from stock options.






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