FBR Capital Remains Bullish on Splunk (SPLK) Following Announced Caspida Acquisition

FBR Capital Reiterates an Outperform rating and $90.00 price target on Splunk (NASDAQ: SPLK) following announced acquisition of Caspida, Inc. Analyst Daniel Ives believes that with the addition of Caspida, Splunk's security products will continue to experience strong adoption.

Ives commented, "Last night, Splunk announced it had acquired Caspida, Inc., a leader in behavior analytics and machine learning, for $190 million. Caspida provides advanced threat detection and covers unknown threats that have already penetrated the enterprise. When coupled with Splunk's existing security solutions, the company should have the ability to detect advanced, hidden, and insider threats, improve threat detection with targeted incident response, and increase security operations center (SOC) efficiency. Caspida was launched in 2014 and is based in Palo Alto, California. Strategically, we believe this is a smart acquisition as it combines Splunk's existing response technologies with Caspida's advanced threat detection capabilities and broadens Splunk's product footprint and customer reach, key ingredients in the company's recipe for success on the security front, in our view. Overall, with the addition of Caspida, we believe Splunk has another solid upsell/cross-sell opportunity as it penetrates new/existing customers, with more enterprises moving to Splunk's big data platform, which we think should result in increased large deal activity over the coming year, adding to what we believe is a healthy pipeline of potential deals for FY16 and beyond. We are maintaining our Outperform rating and $90 price target, which represents a 14x CY16E EV/sales multiple."

For an analyst ratings summary and ratings history on Splunk click here. For more ratings news on Splunk click here.

Shares of Splunk closed at $69.00 yesterday.

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