Intuit To Sell Largest Data Center To H5 Data Centers; Reiterates Outlook

(RTTNews) - Intuit Inc. (INTU) announced the sale of its largest data center as the company continues to migrate its services to the public cloud, moving away from investing in owning hosting platforms.

Intuit said it is selling its Data Center in Quincy, Washington, to H5 Data Centers, a privately-owned data center operator in the U.S.

"We chose to move to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate developer productivity and innovation for our customers, and to accommodate spikes in customer usage through the tax season. Our TurboTax Online customers were served entirely from AWS during the latter part of this tax season, and we expect to finish transitioning QuickBooks Online this year," said Tayloe Stansbury, Intuit Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer.

Intuit expects the sale to result in an operating loss of $75 million to $85 million. However, the impact of this reported operating loss on net income and earnings per share is expected to be offset by tax benefits related to the sale, share based compensation and the reorganization of a subsidiary during the quarter. The net impact is expected to result in no change to reported earnings per share.

Intuit also reiterated its earnings and revenue outlook for the fourth quarter and fiscal 2018.

For the fourth quarter, Intuit affirmed its outlook for revenue of $940 million to $960 million, reported earnings of $0.04 to $0.06 per share and adjusted earnings of $0.22 to $0.24 per share.

For fiscal 2018, Intuit continues to expect revenue of $5.915 billion to $5.935 billion, reported earnings per share of $4.50 to $4.52, and adjusted earnings per share of $5.51 to $5.53.