With earnings season underway, the calendar is packed with companies that ETR tracks in our surveys, and while no single input can paint an entire picture, our forward-looking spending intentions have been proven to correlate to future revenues. As such, let's take a look at what the recent data said about some of the companies reporting next week, starting off with a deep dive into Akamai, whose improving data set warranted a new Positive outlook in the most recent technology spending intentions survey (TSIS). Akamai is set to report next Tuesday, November 8th after the market close.
Updated 2H22 spend indicates that Akamai is bucking the trend of the overall IT spending backdrop with a Net Score that continues to improve. While management cited concerns over 2H22 internet traffic among other things, Akamai's updated 2H22 Net Score is accelerating versus year-ago levels due to fewer plans to decrease spend and lower churn rates. To elaborate, 8.5% of Akamai customers plan to spend negatively with the vendor compared to 14.5% one year ago. In addition, 30% of Akamai customers plan to increase spend in 2H22 versus 23.7% in 2H21. This improvement for Akamai's dataset is consistent across both sectors we track the vendor: Networking and Information Security.
Akamai’s improving Net Score is even more impressive when compared to its closest peers, with both Cloudflare and Fastly seeing spending intent decelerate (as seen below).
In sum, Akamai is one of a few standouts in ETR’s updated 2H22 data showing continued improvements in Net Score driven by more customers increasing spend while fewer indicate decreasing or replacing, warranting a Positive outlook on the data set.
Next up, we quickly review the data set for New Relic, also reporting on Tuesday, November 8th. First, the positive, the vendor is clearly demonstrating growth in its customer base as ETR's Pervasion metric (citation growth within our survey) continues to rise steadily since last year. Pervasion levels have improved y/y over the largest Enterprise Size cuts: Fortune 500, Global 2000, and Large organizations. Retail/Consumer organizations have seen the biggest jump in Pervasion among all industry verticals. Unfortunately, after hitting multi-year highs in our last survey, New Relic’s overall Net Score now has fallen notably below what we captured last year.
This week we wrap up with a beleaguered vendor whose stock is down more than 80% year-to-date after getting labeled as the next Microsoft victim. After the tumultuous sell-off, Ring Central is currently valued at 2x sales and carries a 6% FCF yield. Even with the presence of Microsoft looming over the company, it warrants a quick look at the data set.
After a multi-year decline, the most recent data set showed a rebound in spending intentions, resulting in a bounce back to year-ago levels. At the same time, Pervasion has reached an all-time high within our work. However, the vendor is still capturing a troublesome amount of negative spending intentions with more than 20% of respondents indicating their intent to either decrease spend or replace the vendor (as seen in the red sections of the bar chart below).
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Enterprise Technology Research (ETR) is a technology market research firm that leverages proprietary data from our targeted IT decision maker (ITDM) community to bring you actionable insights about spending intentions and industry trends. Since 2010, we have worked diligently at achieving one goal: eliminating the need for opinions in enterprise research, which are often formed from incomplete, biased, and statistically insignificant data. Our community of ITDMs represents $1+ trillion in annual IT spend and is positioned to provide best-in-class customer/evaluator perspectives. ETR’s proprietary data and insights from this community empower institutional investors, technology companies, and ITDMs to navigate the complex enterprise technology landscape amid an expanding marketplace. Discover what ETR can do for you at www.etr.ai