UPDATED 23:11 EDT / NOVEMBER 15 2017

INFRA

NetApp shares jump 15% thanks to solid flash storage revenue growth

NetApp Inc.’s all-flash memory storage array business gathered new momentum during its fiscal 2018 second quarter, helping the company to beat Wall Street’s forecasts on profit and revenue.

The data and storage management company posted earnings after certain costs such as stock compensation of 81 cents per share on revenue of $1.42 billion. Net income came in at $223 million. Wall Street was expecting earnings per share of just 69 cents on revenues of $1.38 billion.

As a result, NetApp’s shares jumped more than 11 percent in after-hours trading. Update: In morning trading Thursday, shares were rising more than 15 percent.

The highlight of the quarter was NetApp’s all-flash array annualized net revenue, which grew 58 percent from the same period a year ago to hit a run rate of $1.7 billion. That’s up from $1.5 billion in the previous quarter.

NetApp Chief Executive Officer George Kurian also pointed to some of the new products and services the company has launched this year that have helped to drive its growth in segments including cloud, data centers and flash. These include its new hyperconverged infrastructure appliance and its expanded hybrid cloud partnership with Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud.

“We are undoubtedly out-executing our competition on all fronts,” Kurian said on the company’s earnings conference call. “It seemed particularly exciting to see our cloud strategy pay off with our expanded relationship with Microsoft Azure and the industry’s first Azure enterprise NFS service.”

Kurian said NetApp was now in the unique position of being able to help customers leverage their data across the entire infrastructure stack. “No one matches our expertise in data management and open ecosystem approach,” he said.

Kurian added he believes the company is now poised to expand its leadership in a number of growth segments. “Our strong performance was driven by excellent execution and reflects our customers’ clear and growing preference for the value of our Data Fabric strategy,” he said.

NetApp posted fresh guidance for its third quarter, saying it expects earnings per share of between 86 and 94 cents on revenue of $1.425 billion to $1.575 billion.

“We remain cautious long-term as competitors regain footing post acquisitions and storage continues to migrate to the cloud,” Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty wrote in a note to clients. “However, we expect NetApp will continue to out-execute competitors in the next quarter or two.”

The company also announced two new board members, former eBay Inc. Chief Financial Officer Scott Schenkel and Sabre Corp.’s ex-executive vice president and chief technology officer, Deborah Kerr.

Image: NetApp

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