Cloud Computing and Cloud Services Stocks Rise 26% In 1Q 2012

By samdizzy

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For the week ending March 30, 2012, here’s a look at weekly winner activity:

1. Red Hat (RHT, +15.46 percent on the week): Red Hat’s annual revenues have exceeded $1 billion for the first time, and Wall Street seems impressed with the company’s long-term earnings strategy. The effort includes a continued push beyond Linux into open source middleware, open source and cloud storage, and open source virtualization.

2. Carbonite (CARB, +7.52 percent on the week): The cloud backup provider continues to push beyond the consumer market, introducing a service that allows small and midsize businesses to backup NAS (network-attached storage) devices to the Carbonite cloud.

3. Equinix (EQIX, +6.91 percent on the week): Wall Street applauded a partnership between Equinix (a global provider of data center services) and Tier 3 (an enterprise cloud platform provider). Basically, Tier 3’s IaaS will be available in Equinix’s Chicago and New York data centers, with plans to expand into Europe and Asia.

4. Intuit (INTU, +4.25 percent on the week): How’s this for ironic: Intuit was one of our biggest weekly losers last week. Perhaps investors thought shares were oversold…

5. VMWare (VMW, +3.24 percent on the week): Momentum over at Red Hat seemed to spill over in the VMware market. As the theory goes: If Red Hat released strong earnings driven by cloud and virtualization demand, then virtualization market-leader VMware must be plowing ahead as well.

That’s all for now. Come back soon (in less than an hour) and see the best-performing cloud computing stocks for Q1 2012 as well.

A side note: The Talkin’ Cloud Stocks Index is updated each Friday after U.S. markets close for the weekend. We do not make buy, sell or hold recommendations. Instead, Talkin’ Cloud tracks cloud computing and cloud services stocks to see how the overall cloud computing market is evolving. See all Talkin’ Cloud Stocks Index members here.