Over the past decade, cloud computing has been a core component for many thriving enterprises. All ranges of businesses, from streaming platforms to financial services, have embraced the technology. Today, the best cloud computing stocks are still helping enterprises migrate data and applications to the cloud.
Cloud computing technology provides on-demand services such as networking, storage, databases and applications through the Internet. Businesses don’t have to invest in the expensive infrastructure required for these intense computing applications. Instead, they can rely on cloud providers for these services.
While cloud computing has been a technology platform to deliver applications, it’s supporting considerable innovation. According to Gartner, it will be a crucial driver of business innovation going forward. It’s at the center of innovations like artificial intelligence, edge computing, the Internet of Things (IoT) and quantum computing.
Companies are increasingly utilizing cloud computing services to access these new technologies. Additionally, others are shifting to cloud solutions like Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) to reduce costs and achieve operating efficiencies. We discuss the best cloud computing stocks to buy in September.
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(MDB)
MongoDB (NASDAQ:MDB) is a leading document-based database provider. Unlike traditional relational databases like SQL and Oracle, it uses a NoSQL structure. While the company offers a legacy database, its cloud-based Atlas database has been a significant growth driver. Gartner regards MongoDB as a leader in cloud database management systems.
The company will benefit from the adoption of artificial intelligence in the enterprise. As AI systems become widely used in the enterprise, more memory and storage will be required. So, there will be increased demand for database products.
Its document-based model is a natural fit for AI applications due to its flexibility and versatility. Moreover, AI applications need the ability to scale data processing, parallel computations and high performance. And MongoDB offers sharding and auto-scaling features that enable scaling.
On August 31, the company reported stellar earnings, highlighting demand for its database as a service product. Subscription revenue increased 40% year-over-year to $409.3 million. At the same time, cloud-based Atlas revenue increased 38% YOY and now the segment represents 63% of total revenues.
The company continues to see increased workloads and has made efforts to capture more faster. Additionally, it has announced several features, including Atlas Stream Processing, Relational Migrator and Atlas Vector Search, that will enhance revenue growth. Atlas Stream Processing enables developers to work with streaming data for sophisticated event-driven applications.
Additionally, customer growth remains robust. It added another 1900 customers quarter-over-quarter, bringing total customers to 45,000. Atlas ended the quarter with over 43,500 customers compared to 35,500 in the previous year period.
MongoDB will be a platform of choice for AI developers. It enables them to handle large workloads at scale while meeting security and privacy requirements. The company will continue to gain more workloads and is one of the best cloud computing stocks to buy in September.
Monday.com (MNDY)
This software-as-a-service company provides a cloud-based work operating system for project and workflow management. Its Work OS allows businesses to collaborate and enhance their workflows. Due to its ability to offer customizable workspaces without requiring coding, Monday.com (NASDAQ:MNDY) has become an indispensable solution for Fortune 500 companies.
Besides its Work OS Platform, the company has bolstered its offering by adding other features. In August 2022, it launched Monday Sales CRM, a customer relationship management system. The feature allows customers to manage all aspects of the sales cycle. Consequently, the company introduced monday projects, monday dev, monday marketer, and mondayDB.
In the latest results, management highlighted the solid momentum in the new products. “Monday Sales CRM is seeing strong momentum as we roll it out to our existing customer base, and the response to monday dev has been overwhelmingly positive since transitioning the product out of beta,” said co-CEO Eran Zinman. Still, significant opportunities exist to cross-sell the new products to existing customers.
Overall, the fundamental picture remains strong. In the second quarter of fiscal 2023, total revenues were $175.7 million, a 42% YOY growth. At the same time, the GAAP operating loss narrowed from $46.2 million in the second quarter of 2022 to $12.2 million.
Moreover, the company is taking advantage of AI and introducing new products. It introduced monday AI Assistant and new AI capabilities, including email composition, content generation, automated task generation and formula builder. Monday.com is just scratching the surface and is poised for long-term shareholder returns.
Snowflake (SNOW)
Snowflake (NYSE:SNOW) is a data platform as a service company. Over the past year, revenue growth has decelerated partly due to its consumption model. In a consumption model, customers pay for only what they use. In the current challenging macroeconomic environment, its large customers have been scaling back, creating growth headwinds for the company.
However, looking past these economic headwinds, AI applications present an opportunity for the company. Frank Slootman reiterated this view in the second quarter FY2024 earnings call. “Generative AI is at the forefront of customer conversations. However, enterprises are also realizing that they cannot have an AI strategy without a data strategy to base it on,” he noted.
In 2023, most of the AI spending is in silicon or hardware. Management expects spending to hit the software layer in 2024. Snowflake has introduced several products to benefit from AI workloads and is the best cloud computing stock to buy.
Snowflake holds lots of data that customers can leverage in their AI applications. For instance, the company has launched Document AI. The product enables customers to use natural language to query unstructured data such as invoices and legal contracts.
In addition, the company is collaborating with Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) to help businesses build customized generative AI applications. In June, they announced that Nvidia NeMO – a platform to create large language models – would be integrated into Snowflake. Consequently, customers can use their Snowflake account data to build customized LLMs for AI services such as chatbots, summarization and search.
Even before these AI features add to revenues, Snowflake’s growth numbers are impressive. In the second quarter earnings release, management forecast 34% YOY revenue growth in FY2024. On the free cash flow front, they guided for a 26% adjusted free cash flow margin. Given the solid fundamentals, Snowflake remains one of the best cloud computing stocks for patient investors.
On the date of publication, Charles Munyi did not hold (either directly or indirectly) any positions in the securities mentioned in this article. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer, subject to the InvestorPlace.com Publishing Guidelines.