Splunk Q2 results likely to show slowdown, 'uncertainty' ahead: analyst
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Splunk (NASDAQ:SPLK) is slated to report second-quarter results on August 23 and investment firm Monness, Crespi, Hardt believes the quarter will show a slowdown, especially in cloud spending, with further "uncertainty" for the rest of the year.
Analyst Brian White, who has a neutral rating on Splunk (SPLK) shares, said he's expecting revenue growth of 16% year-over-year to $923.9M, which would top the consensus estimate of $888.1M and be an acceleration from the previous quarter. However, that 16% growth rate is down markedly from last year's 32% year-over-year growth.
Additionally, White is expecting license revenue of $308.6M and cloud services revenue of $446.7M, with maintenance and services revenue of $168.7M, down 1% year-over-year. 
"In recent quarters, Splunk has called out delays in workloads migrating and expanding in the cloud," White wrote in an investor note.
White also noted that Splunk's (SPLK) competition has seen some missteps in recent weeks, notably Datadog (DDOG), which issued a weaker-than-expected forecast for the third-quarter and cut its revenue outlook for 2023.
"Datadog called out slower [second-quarter] usage growth at existing customers relative to recent quarters but indicated that aggregate usage growth improved in July, roughly in line with [first-quarter] trends," White added.
Looking into the back-half of fiscal 2024, White is forecasting $1.025B in revenue for the third-quarter and $4.021B for all of fiscal 2024, above Wall Street's forecast of $981.4M and $3.905B, respectively. 
Splunk (SPLK) shares were up 1.2% in pre-market trading on Tuesday.
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