Shares of Aliso Viejo’s Quest Software Inc., a maker of business software, rose on Thursday after the company’s results for the June quarter beat Wall Street’s expectations.
Investors sent shares up nearly 6% in afterhours trading on a market value of $1.7 billion.
For the three months through June 30, Quest reported $186 million in revenue, up 13% from a year earlier and beating analysts’ expectation of $171 million in sales.
Excluding charges for stock compensation, legal fees, write-downs on assets and other one-time costs, Quest tallied $29 million in profits, up 4% from the year-ago quarter and beating analysts’ expectation of $25 million in profits.
“Overall, this was a strong quarter,” Chief Executive Doug Garn said in a statement.
The company ended the June quarter with $439 million in cash and short-term assets.
Quest didn’t give an outlook for the current quarter with its earnings release.
Analysts, on average, are looking for adjusted profits $29 million, roughly flat from a year earlier, on $177 million in sales, which would show a year-over-year rise of 3%.
In a separate announcement on Thursday, Quest said it agreed to buy Austin, Texas-based software maker Surgient Inc. for undisclosed terms.
Surgient makes what’s called cloud automation software, which helps corporations to set up their own cloud computing networks.
Cloud computing helps companies cut data center costs by outsourcing hefty software applications onto others’ servers.
The deal is expected to close during the current quarter.
Quest makes software that manages and improves on other business applications by Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp., IBM Corp. and others.
The software automates tasks performed by technology departments and helps companies get the most out of their servers.
Quest, which has about $700 million in yearly sales, typically does a deal or two every quarter in which it picks up a small, usually private, software maker and folds it into its product lineup.
Earlier this month Quest picked up Germany’s Völcker Informatik AG, a privately held maker of software that helps manage security, access and identity verification for corporations.
Terms of the deal, presumably small, weren’t disclosed.
