Snowflake, Splunk head up slate of post-Thanksgiving earnings reports

Investors coming back from what for many will be a long Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. will find the software infrastructure sector surprisingly busy at the end of the month.

On November 30, Snowflake (NYSE:SNOW), Splunk (NASDAQ:SPLK) and Elastic (NYSE:ESTC) are all set to delivery their quarterly reports, while Sumo Logic (NASDAQ:SUMO) follows on those heels a few days later, with its latest earnings report on December 5.

All four companies provide various cloud-based data analysis, assessment and management technologies and Jefferies analyst Brent Thill said in a recent report that each has specific issues that investors should consider during the upcoming slate of earnings reports.

Thill called Snowflake (SNOW) the strongest among such software companies due its fundamentals, as it “has guided fairly prudently and has left room to beat the high end of their quarterly outlook.” Thill has a buy rating and $200-a-share price target on Snowflake’s (SNOW) stock due in part to the company’s “strong fundamentals.”

Thill said that Snowflake’s (SNOW) revenue from products has room to grow, but the larger economic uncertainty does raise concerns about the market deteriorating in the second half of next year.

For Splunk (SPLK), Thill called the company’s stock his “top value pick”. Thill said that Splunk (SPLK) “has undergone a major cloud business model transition” over the last few years that has caused some volatility when it comes the company’s quarterly revenue results, but is is moving past “the worst of the financial headwinds” in conjunction with its transition to a cloud-based business model. Thill has a buy rating and $100-a-share price target on Splunk’s (SPLK) stock.

With Elastic (ESTC), Thill has a hold rating and $65-a-share price target on the company’s stock. Thill said the provider of private could technology and services “remains relatively resilient” in what has been a tough broader market for infrastructure software, as its revenue expectations remain “reasonable”, and could exceed its outlook for revenue to grow 27% from a year ago.

Thill was a little more guarded about the prospects for Sumo Logic (SUMO), as its third-quarter revenue is forecast to grow at a slower year-over-year rate than in the first and second quarters of this year. Thill said that Sumo’s (SUMO) room from growth “remains capped, with a low probability of an earnings surprise” due to a rough economic backdrop for the software sector.

Thill has a hold rating and $8-a-share price target on Sumo Logic’s (SUMO) stock. Wall Street analysts on the whole give the company’s shares a consensus buy rating, as does Seeking Alpha’s quant system, which historically outperforms the stock market.