Commvault: One Of The Sweeter Fruits New Jersey Has To Offer

#Commvault - Revisiting an old friend after a mid-life crisis I have spent the last few days going through the few remaining publicly traded companies in the enterprise storage space. Commvault (CVLT) is not a storage vendor per se, but it is a company that provides a software solution to provide back-up and recovery solutions for storage users and storage vendors. If the storage space does well, the odds are pretty high that Commvault will do well. Commvault has recently signed a partnership with #Pure (PSTG) and #Cisco (CSCO) that certainly has the potential to be significant in terms of extending the company’s footprint. The partnership has been seemingly ignored by investors, although the ability to use hyper-converged technology as part of its solution set could produce meaningful incremental revenues for CVLT. A few years ago, the company ran into a buzz-saw as its business was substantially impacted by the emergence of cloud storage service offerings and its growth grounded to a halt and for a time revenue growth was negative. The company’s revenues reached a nadir toward the back-half of 2015 and results have improved steadily and significantly since the trough. At the time of the trough, according to the Gartner survey linked here, many users felt that Commvault had lost its technological differentiation, had become difficult to use and it had the reputation as an expensive vendor. Most of those specific issues are apparently behind the company - at least according to Gartner's latest survey - although the financial impact of the adoption of different maintenance pricing models continues to retard the company’s growth potential in terms of headline numbers. That said, in the latest Gartner survey, users report positive experiences and high levels of satisfaction using Commvault's back-up and recovery tools. I last wrote about Commvault almost 9 months ago and the company hasn’t elicited a great deal of interest either back at that time or more recently. The shares have barely budged since my last article (they are up about 6%), a period which has seen the iShares North American Tech-Software ETF (NYSEARCA:IGV) appreciate by 25%. And yet the company has quietly over-attained its articulated forecasts during that period and has seen its revenue growth, and particularly its license revenue growth, accelerate as well. Simply put, Commvault’s house has gotten better, its neighborhood has continued to improve and yet the price of its dwelling has barely risen. It presents a good opportunity and one that has been overlooked by many despite First Call consensus expectations for significant top-line and EPS growth over the next couple of years. The company’s cash flow from operations exceeds non-GAAP net income consistently, primarily because of steady increases in deferred revenues. Since reaching the nadir of the company’s operational performance, the company has consistently increased its guidance, although, as mentioned earlier, its share price has not reflected that trend. It has been consistently able to surpass consensus expectations over that span, by amounts ranging from 25% to 8%, and I have no reason to believe that the current quarter will not continue that kind of performance. The company has announced that it will be reporting earnings toward the end of this month and I think it might well be an appropriate time for readers/investors to re-acquaint themselves with the investment case for the shares

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4087916-commvault-one-sweeter-fruits-new-jersey-offer