Last Week in NJ Tech: Company News Roundup
Last week was bright for at least one N.J. public company:
- For CommVault Systems (Oceanport), Q1 results were higher than expected. The company has forecast strong demand and growth through fiscal 2013. CEO N. Robert Hammer said he was confident the company would achieve solid double-digit growth for fiscal 2013. Shares rose almost 9 percent after the earnings release, although they fell back a bit. The company did warn there were some uncertainties ahead, including deceleration in tech spending growth and a U.S. government spending slowdown.
- In other news, CommVault’s bid to purchase a 55-acre tract in the former Fort Monmouth army base’s Tinton Falls section was approved by the Fort Monmouth Economic Revitalization Authority. There were other bidders for the property. The Star Ledger reported that in March the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (EDA) board awarded CommVault two financial incentives: $7.2 million under the Business Employment Incentive Program to create 250 jobs, and $1.35 million for a Business Retention and Relocation Assistance Grant to keep 300 employees here. The company, which has about 540 N.J. employees, expects to bring more than 2,000 more to the area and is predicting 700 new hires within a year. CommVault plans to build a new high tech-office and research facility on the site.
On the other hand, several companies have run into difficulties:
- Synchronoss (Bridgewater) stock took a big hit last week. The company announced great results for the quarter, but stock declined 24 percent to $21.52 after sinking earlier by 27 percent. The problem appears to be that Synchronoss, while strengthening its relationships with Verizon and Vodafone, was expecting less business from AT&T;, at least in the near term. CEO Stephen Waldis said in a conference call that the company’s updated deployment strategy for AT&T; will have a negative impact on its near-term revenue from this channel, because the time period for high-priced manual intensive transactions will be consolidated. “In addition, there are certain voice-related transactions we’ve identified that are both highly manual and not eligible for automation, and as a result, we will not be pursuing them because these types of transactions are not consistent with our business focus,” Waldis explained. Synchronoss subsequently announced a stock repurchase program.
- Cognizant Technology Solutions (Teaneck), while posting a 17 percent rise in net profit for the first quarter, lowered its full-year guidance. During the conference call, CEO Francisco D’Souza said, “The acceleration the company usually sees in our North American business coming out of Q1 is slower than what we anticipated. This trend was particularly evident in the banking portion of our financial services segment and the pharmaceuticals portion of our healthcare segment.” Cognizant shares took an instant hit, declining almost 20 percent the day it announced its earnings, but they rebounded nicely the next day on bargain hunting. The company also announced an expanded share-repurchase plan and expects to repurchase up to $1 billion in stock.
- Shares of Universal Display (Ewing) also took a hit. The company provides the technology behind the organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays on Samsung’s Galaxy line of tablets. The stock was down almost 18 percent after the firm announced Q1 earnings. Although the results in the quarter “continued to reflect demand for the company’s proprietary materials and technologies,” they didn’t reflect Samsung payments under a new license agreement, which are realized in the second and fourth quarters. The company reported operating losses of $1.6 million and a net loss of $1.2 million on Q1 revenues of $12.6 million.
- While Glowpoint (Murray Hill) saw a strong sales pipeline for its suite of cloud-managed video services, the company said “elongated sales cycles and soft channel sales” caused slower growth in Q1 2012. Revenues for the quarter were $3.3 million, an increase of 5 percent over the same period last year, but network services revenues for the quarter were $3.1 million, a decrease of 11 percent over the same period a year ago. On an optimistic note, CEO Joe Laezza said deal activity is picking up.
Last week a couple of companies announced moves out of N.J., including one promising startup and a long-term N.J. tech company.
- RealMatch, a recruitment advertising network, has consolidated its company, which was operating in Maryland and various parts of N.J., to Manhattan’s financial district. Gal Almog, RealMatch founder and CEO, said the move was good for the company, much of whose growth is built on that of the New York metropolitan area.
- Defense tech firm DRS Technologies has restructured and is consolidating its corporate functions, now based in Parsippany and Rockville, Md., to Arlington, Va. The company anticipates it will be out of N.J. by year’s end. DRS is a subsidiary of Finmeccanica, an Italian holding company.
In other news:
- MindTree (Warren) and global telecommunications and IT service provider KPN (the Netherlands) said they would create a partnership to jointly invest in a cloud services aggregator platform for enterprise customers. The new platform brings together MindTree catalog products, KPN product applications and customer applications under a single platform to be delivered as software as a service (SaaS). The platform will provide one unified contract, a single sign-on, centralized governance and one bill, MindTree said.
- Bizzingo (Flemington) said it had acquired the mobile platform and intellectual property of IntroMe, a San Francisco startup founded in 2011. The B2B social networking company has acquired IntroMe to help expand its platform to mobile devices and add a social component to the company’s business platform. The IntroMe team is staying in Calif., a spokeswoman said, and there will be no net job gains for N.J. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.