William Blair analyst Bhavan Suri called Splunk's quarterly results an "exceptional performance" that was "'nothing short of impressive" and said its calculated billings reflect very healthy business momentum. While some investors may have concerns about the deceleration in short-term deferred revenue growth, Suri attributes this to the company's accelerating cloud business, noting that most cloud contracts have smaller initial deal sizes and annual billing arrangements. Suri, who thinks Splunk is seeing solid traction across core use-cases, premium applications, and the cloud, keeps an Outperform rating on the stock.