It is true that much has been made (including by me) of reported changes made by certain research analysts in their estimates of future performance. Let’s come back to that after we look at the facts on the prospectus.

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Apparently the final reassurance analysts and investors were looking for was that the company is indeed still growing.

Despite taking several measures over the past couple of months in the wake of an awkward fourth-quarter earnings revision, Groupon has not been able to regain investor confidence and has watched its stock price slowly dwindle to half its IPO price of $20 a share.

Today, the company’s stock opened at $14.93 a share before settling at $12.17 at the close, up 3.7 percent.

At least two analysts were bullish on yesterday’s first-quarter results, upgrading Groupon’s stock to a buy.

Sterne Agee upgraded Groupon from neutral to a buy and set a price target of $20. In a note to investors, analysts Arvind Bhatia and Brett Strauser wrote that the strong first quarter “alleviated several concerns,” including Groupon’s ability to have operating leverage. An additional plus, they wrote, is that the stock is trading so far below its IPO price.

Likewise, Mark Mahaney from Citi wrote that “we’ll grab this deal,” and upgraded the stock to a buy with a $22 price target. Four factors drove his decision: 33 percent quarter-over-quarter revenue growth in North America, international margins turning positive for the first time, marketing spending declining for the fourth quarter in a row and the very low stock price.

As my colleague Ina Fried reported yesterday, Groupon’s first-quarter revenues topped the company’s prior forecast as well as analyst expectations, totaling $559.3 million during the period, compared with $295.5 million a year ago. Operating income was $39.6 million, including an expense of $28 million related to non-cash stock-based compensation.

The strong results helped overshadow the company’s previous follies, which included the financial revision in the fourth quarter due to higher than expected holiday returns and the disclosure that auditors had determined it had a material weakness in its financial processes.

In a conference call with analysts, Groupon’s CFO Jason Child, who is under fire over the gaffes, said: “There’s some specific tasks that we have implemented and are going to implement. We’ve certainly added some people, and have some more work there. We have 48 countries and so we do have accounting personnel and controllers in every single country.”

In addition, Groupon has taken several precautions over the past couple of months to ensure the mishaps won’t happen again.

For example, Groupon has hired Kal Raman to build out the company’s internal controls and processes as the SVP of Americas. He previously held executive roles at Amazon, eBay and Drugstore.com. Groupon also nominated two new members with accounting prowess to the board and has been working on its financial controls.

Child said that since being tripped by holiday returns, the company has implemented a more granular statistical model that maps returns on a weekly basis.

“From a process standpoint we are in good shape, and there’s some technology that is especially helpful with a company like ours,” he said. “We made a lot of progress this quarter, and will make a lot of progress next quarter, and hopefully in the next quarter or two, we’ve done all the steps necessary.”

Groupon’s auditors won’t review whether the company has rectified its financial processes until the end of the year, so even if the company moves faster the label will remain.

In a recent letter to shareholders, Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason said he did not have regrets on moving too fast.

“Although there are risks in moving too fast, companies often don’t survive long enough to apologize for moving too slow,” Mason writes. “Perhaps more importantly, by moving quickly, we reached a scale that has helped us solidify our market leadership, and accumulated data that is enabling our future and helping us continuously improve the experience of our customers.”

Stern Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia initiated coverage on Facebook shares on Monday morning with a “buy” rating, setting a price target at $46 for the next 12 months. Bhatia’s take comes on the heels of a similar, though informal, coverage note issued to media last Friday from Wedbush Securities, where the firm targeted Facebook’s share price at $44.

Both targets are set squarely above Facebook’s estimated share price range of $28 to $35, and would value the company at close to $100 billion.

Bhatia’s report cites Facebook’s upheaval of the online ad industry, a harbinger of change similar to the likes of Google almost eight years previous. Taking into account Facebook’s massive 900 million user reach, steadily growing average revenue per user numbers and the company’s high — though as yet untested — hopes for mobile monetization, Bhatia’s outlook on the company is bullish.

Though some say it’s not just about ads. “If you look further into the future, I believe they want to compete directly with the likes of Google, Amazon, Apple, companies with diverse product portfolios,” Gartner Research VP Brian Blau told AllThingsD in an interview. “They have the users, and they’re doing well with advertising, but they just don’t have all the products that its other competitors do. At least, not yet.”

The fervor for Facebook’s stock is at an all-time high in light of the company kicking off its roadshow to potential investors this week, with Zuckerberg and CFO David Ebersman making pitches in person.

Though it doesn’t seem like investors need much convincing; the roadshow festivities began midday on Monday at the Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan, with more than 500 investors and analysts flooding in to get a peek at Zuck’s performance. An onlooker said the CEO looked “likeable and affable,” according to an article in The Wall Street Journal.

And no, there was no half-windsor around Zuck’s neck — he made the pitch in his trademark hoodie.

Well, today we heard from another bank, and its opinions about Intel’s Romley chip and what it means for data center spending couldn’t be more different. Chris Whitmore, an analyst with Deutsche Bank Market Research, published a note to clients today, arguing that Romley will indeed spur a new round of spending in corporate data centers, and that it will have an equally strong secondary effect on the fortunes of enterprise storage companies, specifically EMC and NetApp.

One of the things that Romley will encourage, Whitmore writes, is a growth in the density of virtual machines running in each server. (Remember that, more often than not, a physical server is virtualized or subdivided into many virtual servers, allowing each machine to act like several machines.) More virtual machines allows you to consolidate your physical machines and add more in the same footprint if you want, which in turn means more computing work getting done overall. Whitmore estimates that, in general, data centers will boost their workloads by 20 to 25 percent by the end of next year.

Roughly 26 percent of Romley chip purchases will be used in these virtualized environments, Whitmore estimates. And that tends to spur demand for storage to support the virtual machines. In fact, the growth of terabytes worth of storage products shipped mirrors closely the unit growth of servers. (See the graphic, below, which I screen-grabbed from the report; click to see it bigger.) In short, it’s good news for NetApp and EMC. Whitmore says both are taking share from other vendors, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, with sales growing at north of 20 percent a year — a growth rate that’s higher than that of the overall market, which grew 14 percent last year. He rates shares of both EMC and NetApp a “buy,” with price targets of $35 and $60, respectively.

Great news for EMC and NetApp, but what does it mean for Intel? Whitmore says to expect a mixed bag. Companies wanting to boost their use of virtual machines will be buyers. Companies that aren’t into virtualization so much, maybe not. “We believe our estimate of x86 servers shipped into virtual environments growing from 21 percent in 2011 to 26 percent in 2013 could prove conservative,” Whitmore writes. “As a result, although we expect Romley to have a relatively muted impact on overall server unit demand, we do expect it to drive another leg of virtual machine growth.”

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The EPS number exceeded the expectations of analysts, who had anticipated HP would report per-share earnings of 87 cents. But sales at $30 billion even were light of the $30.7 billion Wall Street had expected.

Sales of PCs fell 15 percent year over year with an operating margin of 5.2 percent. Consumer sales fell by 25 percent and corporate PC sales fell 7 percent, while sales on a unit basis fell 18 percent. HP had faced a tough quarter on many fronts. With the shortage in hard drives caused by the last year’s floods in Thailand sapping overall demand for PCs, sales have been tricky and it showed. Corporate demand was thought to be relatively stable, while consumer demand continues to be slow amid stiff competition from Apple’s iPad and a tough economy overall.

Tony Sacconaghi, an analyst with Bernstein Research, said in a research note to clients issued today that HP, despite being the world’s largest vendor of PCs, appears to have struggled more with the Thailand problem than any other vendor.

On the printer front, HP’s Imaging and Printing Group saw its sales decline by 7 percent with a shockingly low 12.2 percent operating margin, down from 15.4 percent in 2011. HP’s printer unit has significant long-term problems, not the least of which is the fact that people are generally printing less. At first blush, this appears to be a serious blow to a business unit that was once the pride of the company.

Enterprise servers, Storage and Networking saw a 10 percent decline overall. The Business Critical server business — the one involving servers running Intel’s Itanium chip, which is the subject of an HP lawsuit against Oracle — saw its sales decline 27 percent. Networking revenue was flat and everything else was down.

Software was a bright spot, but a small one. Sales were up 30 percent and services grew 108 percent, but again, that’s off a low base and nowhere near large enough to offset the troubles anywhere else.

HP’s guidance for the current quarter is also below the street consensus. HP says it sees earnings of 88 to 91 cents, versus the street forecast of 95 cents. There’s no change to the full-year EPS guidance calling for $4 a share in 2012.

HP shares are down by 19 cents, or less than 1 percent in after-hours trading as of 4:26 pm ET. It’s a mixed bag, so given Dell’s performance yesterday, it seems investors are willing to accept an EPS beat alongside a slight revenue miss.

That’s a quick look at the results. HP’s conference call with analysts begins at 2 pm PT. I’ll be dialed in and liveblogging the blow-by-blow.

Here’s HP’s statement:

HP Reports First Quarter 2012 Results
— First quarter non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $0.92, down 32% from the prior-year period and above previously provided outlook of $0.83 to $0.86 per share
— First quarter GAAP diluted earnings per share of $0.73, down 38% from the prior-year period and above previously provided outlook of $0.61 to $0.64 per share
— First quarter net revenue of $30.0 billion, down 7% from the prior- year period
— Returned $1.0 billion in cash to shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases
PALO ALTO, Calif., Feb. 22, 2012 – HP today announced financial results for its first fiscal quarter ended January 31, 2012. For the quarter, net revenue of $30.0 billion was down 7% from the prior-year period, and down 8% when adjusted for the effects of currency.
GAAP diluted earnings per share (EPS) was $0.73, down 38% from the prior-year period. Non-GAAP diluted EPS was $0.92, down 32% from the prior-year period. First quarter non-GAAP earnings information excludes after-tax costs of $364 million, or $0.19 per diluted share, related to amortization of purchased intangible assets, restructuring charges and acquisition-related charges.
―In the first quarter, we delivered on our Q1 outlook and remained focused on the fundamentals to drive long-term sustainable returns,‖ said Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer. ―We are taking the necessary steps to improve execution, increase effectiveness and capitalize on emerging opportunities to reassert HP’s technology leadership.‖

Earnings highlights
Information about HP’s use of non-GAAP financial information is provided under ―Use of non-GAAP financial information‖ below.
Trends and regional performance
In the Americas, first quarter revenue was $13.2 billion, down 9% year over year and down 8% when adjusted for the effects of currency. Europe, the Middle East and Africa revenue of $11.7 billion was down 4% year over year and down 5% when adjusted for the effects of currency. Revenue in Asia Pacific was $5.2 billion, representing a 10% decrease year over year and down 12% when adjusted for the effects of currency.
Revenue from outside of the United States in the first quarter accounted for 66% of total HP revenue. BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) generated revenue of $3.1 billion, down 13% from the year-ago period, and representing 10% of total HP revenue.
Revenue in HP’s commercial businesses declined 4% year over year. Revenue in HP’s consumer businesses, within PSG and IPG, was collectively down 23% year over year.
Business group results
— Personal Systems Group (PSG) revenue declined 15% year over year with a 5.2% operating margin. Commercial client revenue declined 7%, Consumer client revenue declined 25% and Workstations revenue was flat. Total units were down 18%, with a 19% decline in desktop units and an 18% decline in notebook units.
— Services revenue of $8.6 billion grew 1% year over year with a 10.5% operating margin. Technology Services revenue grew 2%, Application and Business Services revenue was flat and IT Outsourcing revenue grew 2% year over year.
— Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) revenue declined 7% year over year with a 12.2% operating margin. Commercial hardware revenue was down 5% year over year with commercial printer units down 10%. Consumer hardware revenue was down 15% year over year with a 15% decline in printer units.
— Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking (ESSN) revenue declined 10% year over year with an 11.2% operating margin. Networking revenue was flat, Industry Standard Servers revenue was down 11%, Business Critical Systems revenue was down 27% and Storage revenue was down 6% year over year.
— Software revenue grew 30% year over year with a 17.1% operating margin, including the results of Autonomy. Software revenue was driven by 12% license growth, 22% support growth and 108% growth in services.
— HP Financial Services revenue grew 15% year over year driven by an 8% increase in net portfolio assets and flat financing volume. The business delivered a 9.6% operating margin.
Asset management
HP generated $1.2 billion in cash flow from operations in the first quarter. Inventory ended the quarter at $7.3 billion, with days of inventory up 3 days year over year to 28 days. Accounts receivable of $15.9 billion was up 2 days year over year to 48 days. Accounts payable ended the quarter at $12.4 billion, down 2 days from the prior- year period at 48 days. HP’s dividend payment of $0.12 per share in the first quarter resulted in cash usage of $244 million. HP also utilized $780 million of cash during the quarter to repurchase approximately 29 million shares of common stock in the open market. HP exited the quarter with $8.2 billion in gross cash.

Outlook
For the second quarter of fiscal 2012, HP estimates non-GAAP diluted EPS to be in the range of $0.88 to $0.91 and GAAP diluted EPS to be in the range of $0.68 to $0.71.
Second quarter fiscal 2012 non-GAAP diluted EPS estimates exclude after-tax costs of approximately $0.20 per share, related primarily to the amortization of purchased intangible assets, restructuring charges and acquisition-related charges.
There is no change to HP’s previously provided full year fiscal 2012 outlook of non-GAAP diluted EPS of at least $4.00 and GAAP diluted EPS of approximately $3.20.
Full year fiscal 2012 non-GAAP diluted EPS estimates exclude after-tax costs of approximately $0.80 per share, related primarily to the amortization of purchased intangible assets, restructuring charges and acquisition-related charges.
As part of its annual financial review process, HP implemented several organizational realignments effective Q1 FY12. To provide improved visibility and comparability, HP has reflected these realignments in prior financial reporting periods on an as-if basis. These realignments resulted in, among other things, the transfer of revenue within and among various financial reporting segments and business units. The changes do not impact HP’s previously reported consolidated net revenue, earnings from operations, net earnings or earnings per share at the company level. To reflect these changes, HP released modified quarterly and annual consolidated condensed statements of earnings, segment financial results and statements of business unit revenue for fiscal 2010 and 2011, which are available on HP’s Investor Relations website at www.hp.com/investor/home.
More information on HP’s quarterly earnings, including additional financial analysis and an earnings overview presentation, is available on HP’s Investor Relations website at www.hp.com/investor/home.
HP’s Q1 FY12 earnings conference call is accessible via an audio webcast at www.hp.com/investor/2012Q1webcast.

Cisco’s recent history is peppered with instances of missed quarters that deliver on results but offer poor outlook. After a restructuring that saw the company cut 6,500 jobs, kill its consumer-oriented products, sell off its Mexico-based manufacturing operations to China’s Foxconn and recalibrate its long-term growth expectations with the financial community, the pressure is on Cisco and its CEO John Chambers to show that the changes were not only for the better, but that they’re taking hold.

Cisco is supposedly back in fighting trim. A new ad campaign, coupled with aggressive strategies in new market areas like cloud computing, coupled with a pivot away from unsuccessful consumer products, suggest that the company is back on track. But can the apparent progress made last quarter stick?

Analysts are expecting a profit of 43 cents a share on sales of $11.23 billion. Analyst Sanjiv Wadhwani of Stifel Nicolaus expects the results to come in slightly better than that. Writing in a research note to clients last week, he checked Cisco’s channel and found that sales of switching products, weak in recent quarters, appears on track to better than expected. Router sales appeared stronger versus competitors, specifically Juniper, despite a relatively weak environment for IT spending overall.

Geographically, spending in the U.S. was steady and, surprisingly, so was spending in Europe, except for in southern European countries like Greece and Italy, were the sovereign debt crisis has been so acute.

Weaknesses will be apparent, Wadhwani says, in sales of set-top boxes, suffering, in part, because of the shortage of hard drives as a result of the flooding in Thailand. Gross margins, a key metric of profitability, may be down slightly in part of a large sale of aggressively priced routers to China. One bright spot of note: During the quarter, Cisco announced that its Unified Computing System — its cloud computing hardware offering — has reached 10,000 customers and is, roughly, a $1 billion business.

Wadhwani says he expects Chambers to set a positive tone in his guidance. “As far as orders are concerned, feedback has been generally positive and consequently we expect the company to provide solid guidance for April. We also expect a positive tone from CEO John Chambers with optimism about the U.S. leading the world in an economic recovery.” That would be a nice change from the depressing results announced a year ago.

One highlight, Keirstead writes, appears to be Salesforce’s Service Cloud, the service that companies use to track customer complaints on the Web and social media sites. Meanwhile, the average size of deals is climbing as large companies are buying incrementally more expensive versions of different Salesforce products.

And even though Salesforce missed on billings last quarter, prompting a nasty selloff of its shares the next day, Keirstead is unconvinced that was called for. “While the bear case is rooted in a view that the modest October quarter billings miss was a harbinger of slowing momentum, we just don’t see it,” he wrote. One source told him that Salesforce’s reps pushed the social products like Chatter a little harder to the detriment of other core products.

He expects Salesforce to make up for that billings miss this time around: He looks for unbilled backlog to grow 40 percent to $2.1 billion and for operating cash flow to grow by 20 percent, which is good, but still below the previously forecast range. All things considered, Salesforce, he says, may be undervalued. It’s currently trading at less than six times projected sales in fiscal 2013. He rates it with an “outperform,” and gives it a $150 price target.

The comments follow a less than stellar fourth-quarter performance in which the gigantic e-commerce provider spent nearly as much money as it brought in the door — even during its busiest quarter of the year.

Profits for the quarter fell 58 percent, while annual earnings were cut nearly in half.

Some analysts were hoping that the end of the year would be a low point for margins and that Amazon would start growing in 2012 as it benefited from the steep investments made the prior year.

But that’s not part of the plan.

“We’re incredibly optimistic about the opportunity that we have, and that’s why we have invested the way we have and why we’re continuing to invest in the business,” said Amazon’s CFO Tom Szkutak in a conference call with analysts.

For clarity, Piper Jaffray analyst Charles Munster asked again: “So, your outlook in terms of investment philosophy hasn’t changed versus last quarter going forward?”

“No, no,” Szkutak said. “We are continuing to look as we always do. We learn every week, month and quarter about customer adoption. We are looking at a lot of positive things across the business in terms of adoption, specifically Kindle growth from a device standpoint and content that’s following that.”

Other categories seeing growth, he said, include clothing, consumables, consumer electronics and Amazon Web Services.

“There’s a lot of interesting opportunities that we continue to invest in. So we are pleased with the performance in Q4 and what it means going forward for us.”

Over the past year, Amazon has invested heavily in infrastructure, including 17 fulfillment centers around the globe. At the end of the year, it had 56,200 employees, up 67 percent year over year, with most of the hiring coming in operations and customer service.

It has also invested heavily in the digital content business, including the Kindle.

It’s widely assumed that Amazon is breaking even or taking a slight loss on the sale of each Kindle Fire. It’s also securing expensive partnerships with content companies across music, video and books, and giving some of that content away as part of the $80 Prime membership, which also includes free two-day shipping.

All of those are bets that Amazon is hoping will reap profits over the long term, as customers continue to consume after they purchase an e-reader or tablet or sign up for Prime.

So far, it’s too early to see how the investment is faring, especially when it comes to new categories.

“It’s very, very early,” Szkutak said, “but so far, we like what we see, so that’s why we are continuing down the path of adding more content and making Prime better. … Because we are investing a lot, we are making sure we understand it very well.”

A lot of details, like Kindle sales numbers, are still being kept under wraps, but he promised Amazon will someday share more about how it is doing.

Unfortunately, the market isn’t as patient. In after-hours trading, the stock was down almost 10 percent at one point. During the session, it ended up down, 8.7 percent, or nearly $17 , to close at $177.50 a share.

The results beat both the company’s own revenue forecast of $3.35 billion and analysts’ estimates of $3.32 billion.

In after-hours trading, the company’s stock was up 66 cents, or 2.2 percent, to trade at $31 a share.

The rebound is perhaps a relief since the company’s stock had been trading somewhat lower since it announced earlier this month that Scott Thompson, the president of PayPal, was leaving the company to become the CEO of Yahoo.

The company’s earnings also exceeded expectations. Its non-GAAP earnings of 60 cents a share, which excludes some non-cash items, beat analysts’ expectations of 57 cents a share. Internally, the company had forecast non-GAAP earnings between 55 and 58 cents a share.

On a GAAP basis, the company reported $2 billion, or $1.51 a share, in the fourth quarter, bolstered by a gain on the sale of the company’s investment in Skype.

Retailers during the holiday quarter can often report mixed results, depending on consumer demand during the business shopping season. EBay’s results are perhaps a good signal for the overall market since it is one of the first e-commerce providers to report year-end results.

Amazon, the e-commerce leader, will report Q4 results on Jan. 31.

For the full-year, eBay said revenue increased 27 percent to $11.7 billion and net income totaled $3.2 billion, up 79 percent over the prior year.

PayPal, one of eBay’s fastest-growing businesses, also reported a strong quarter.

The payments division said revenues in Q4 totaled $1.2 billion, up 28 percent from the year-ago period. A lot of that was driven by new accounts and the adoption of mobile payments.

As previously announced, the company said its mobile payment volume reached $4 billion in 2011, more than five times the mobile payment volume in the prior year. It also said that it added one million new accounts on average each month of the year.

EBay said its forecast for the first quarter will not be as robust, which typically happens as spending levels go back to normal. It expects revenues of up to $3.15 billion, with non-GAAP earnings per share of up to 51 cents a share.

At one point today, the stock dipped as low as $7.97 a share before closing at $8 even.

At that price, it is $2 below it’s initial stock price of $10, and has lost at least 20 percent of its market value in less than a month.

But why?

The San Francisco social games company has launched at least two new games since going public, and over the past few days, no harsh analyst report has come out with a negative rating.

It appears the once high-flying Silicon Valley company — known for addictive games on Facebook like FarmVille and CityVille, and mobile games like Words With Friends — is having a hard time gaining the market’s confidence.

To be sure, there’s no clear answer for the price drop; and other tech companies that recently went public, such as Groupon or LinkedIn, have experienced their own fluctuations. But there is one theory making the rounds.

Analysts and other sources suspect Zynga’s stock has been propped up over the past month by the underwriters, who agreed to buy shares if the stock started to perform poorly. The stock purchases would have created steady demand for the stock and kept the price relatively stable.

Furthermore, the theory goes, the underwriters have since met their obligations for buying the stock, and therefore are are no longer buying as many shares.

Incidentally, on Friday, Morgan Stanley — one of Zynga’s underwriters — disclosed that it had purchased nearly 16 million shares in December.

But while the disclosure, filed with the with the Securities & Exchange Commission, adds fuel to the theory, it is unclear if those shares were purchased as part of the IPO, or if they were spread out throughout the month.

Zynga declined to comment, citing its quiet period.

Still, whatever the reason for the drop, Zynga’s shares are seeing less demand.

As recently as last week, the stock was trading at $9.45 a share, but since then, it has struggled to stay above $9. On Friday, it lost 12 cents; today, it lost 81 cents, or 9 percent.

But even if the underwriting theory is on the mark, it doesn’t explain the broader question of why Zynga’s stock price is falling. Shouldn’t there be other investors who are willing to buy up a piece of Zynga?

Unfortunately, it seems the market isn’t sure what to do with the stock, or how to value it.

A social games company fits somewhere between traditional game makers, like Electronic Arts and Activision; and an Internet stock, like Google or LinkedIn.

Zynga gives away its games for free, but still manages to be profitable from selling virtual goods, such as a tractor or more power-ups, that a small number of players elect to purchase inside the games.

It’s also heavily reliant upon Facebook, which could be another problem. Facebook, too, operates privately, and reveals only as much information about its business as it has to — at least until it files to go public, which could be later this year.

In all likelihood, many of these investor fears could be settled when Zynga reports its first period as a public company. No word on when that will be yet, but the fourth-quarter report should come as soon as this month, and no later than February.

Although the season kicked off with a bang, there were fears that consumer confidence would fall as the end of the year approached. That did not happen, with people continuing to fill their virtual shopping carts until the very last minute; 10 individual days surpassed $1 billion in spending.

According to comScore, the final tally for online spending for the months of November and December was $37.2 billion, representing a 15 percent increase over last year.

ComScore tracks purchases made on Web sites from a fixed Internet connection, excluding spending done via mobile phones and tablets, so presumably the numbers could be higher.

While the numbers being reported sound positive, some analysts worry if they were enough to give giants like Amazon the growth rates needed to hit expectations. Wall Street analysts are expecting Amazon to post a fourth-quarter growth rate of 38 percent, which would mean it would have to be growing twice as fast as the average market.

But Chase Paymentech’s annual Cyber Holiday Pulse Index painted a rosier picture of the holiday season. Based on tracking 50 of the leading online merchants in the U.S., the report found that during the final two months of the year, transactions were up 37 percent and sales rose 25 percent.

One of the reasons for the huge gains, it said, was because Christmas fell on a Sunday this year, allowing merchants to guarantee shipping much later into the week and giving consumers more time to make online transactions.

To be sure, the increase in online shopping is coming from somewhere — most likely at the expense of traditional retail, which is expected to report a less impressive 4 percent growth rate this year.

“It’s clear that e-commerce continues to gain market share from traditional retail due to the attractiveness of the Internet’s convenience and lower prices,” said comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni. “Consumers were especially attracted to the deals and discounts available through digital channels -– particularly free shipping, which occurred on well over half of transactions this season.”

The most impressive finding of the season was that 10 individual days surpassed $1 billion in spending, compared to only one day in 2010.

Here is a list of the 10 biggest online shopping days in 2011, led by Cyber Monday:

(Image credit: iStockphoto.com/mbortolino)

Take Reiss Innovations, for example.

Six years ago, owner Ken Reiss was selling five to 10 mouse pads a year through Amazon. Flash forward to 2011, Reiss increased the number of products he sells by 50 percent compared to last year and expanded into Canada.

In many ways, Amazon is a giant built on the backs of millions of individuals.

Or at least that’s the message the Amazon wants you to hear this morning.

Along with a laundry list of holiday announcements, it said its third-party sellers reported record growth this Christmas season. This year, nearly 40 percent of products purchased by Amazon customers were sold by more than two million independent sellers of all sizes.

But it’s hard to read the story of Reiss Innovations and others in the press release and not think “damage control.”

Earlier this month, Amazon faced a flurry of criticism after launching a promotion that would give consumers $5 off if they compared prices using Amazon’s mobile phone application in the store.

The one-day promotion served as a way for Amazon to increase usage of its Price Check application, while also collecting intelligence on prices in the stores. Consumers received the discount if they bought the item using their phone.

Small and large retailers, which worried that their stores would only become showrooms, called the move anti-competitive. Meanwhile, consumers pledged to buy locally and created Facebook pages in opposition and petitions asking Amazon to end the one-day promotion. In addition, eBay offered consumers $10 to walk back into the stores.

In this morning’s press release, Amazon also mentioned Scharf Industries, an office and electronics provider, that reported a sales increase of more than 500 percent this holiday season compared to last year.

Other third-party successes Amazon pointed to:

• Sellers sold enough cameras for every fan at the next 10 Super Bowls.
• Sellers sold enough toys to give one to every resident of Chicago.

It did not mention third-party sellers in last year’s press release, but it did mention how many times its Price Check application was used — a fact that was surreptitiously left out of this year.

To be sure, Amazon’s services give these retailers access to millions of consumers they may not ordinarily reach. But these retailers pay dearly for the opportunity.

Prices vary widely based on the services being provided and the product being sold, but as an example, a $10 book would glean a proceed of $6.42. Meanwhile, a $200 camera would garner $182.37. In these scenarios, Amazon is also offering fulfillment services, which means it will store, pack and ship orders from its warehouses as soon as an item is purchased online. That results in an additional fee, of course.

If Amazon’s promotion did motivate people to shop locally instead of buying online, it’s really not obvious.

ComScore reports that online shopping this holiday season was up 15 percent compared to a year ago and Wall Street analysts are expecting Amazon’s fourth-quarter revenues to be up at least 38 percent year over year.

It’s not the only one: Several enterprise software and hardware players are falling right along with Oracle. Salesforce.com, whose primary customer relationship management software rivals Oracle’s, has fallen more than $8, or more than 8 percent. Oracle’s primary software rival, SAP, is down by more than $3, or more than 5 percent. IBM has fallen $6.73, or more than 3 percent. Hewlett-Packard is down 50 cents, or nearly 2 percent. Dell is down 40 cents, or more than 2 percent. Microsoft is falling, too, but not as much.

It looks a lot like what Cannaccord Genuity analyst Richard David predicted in a note to clients this morning. Oracle is something of a bellwether for software company and corporate IT stocks in general. A lot of the problems that sapped Oracle’s results this quarter, David wrote, are specific to Oracle. But in the minds of investors it doesn’t matter:

“Much of the miss was company specific, but it won’t matter this morning. Investors are likely to use this miss as a reason to pound software on Wednesday. We believe Oracle’s miss, combined with Red Hat’s heavily punished but modest scuffle on Tuesday, will first hit infrastructure stocks like VMWare, Citrix Sysems and then for good measure high fliers like Salesforce.com. Our view is more nuanced; Oracle missed because some buyers waited for a new hardware upgrade, and on the software front the firm is behind the curve in cloud applications. We expect Oracle to catch up, but it will be through some R&D and a lot of M&A. We would “back up the truck” on Salesforce if traders knock that stock down because cloud software companies are very likely to gain significant market share from non-cloud vendors.”

Davis cut his rating on Oracle to “Hold” from “Buy,” arguing that the shares will “trade sideways for the next two to three quarters.” Even after an expected “dead cat bounce” — a quick price recovery after a significant fall — Oracle will have some work to do. “Oracle will have to rebuild confidence that the firm is not is not headed to Microsoft’s valuation level over the next few years. Therefore, we can no longer rate Oracle a Buy.”

Not everyone was quite so negative. FBR analyst David Hilal, in a note to clients this morning, lowered his estimates on Oracle’s sales and profits for fiscal 2012. He now expects Oracle to report per-share profits of $2.36, down from $2.44, and cut his sales estimate to $37.7 billion from $39 billion. He also lowered his target to $34 from $38. Even so, he’s still bullish generally, albeit with lower expectations. “The macro debate will now focus on whether IT spending is finally coming under pressure due to broader economic concerns,” Hilal wrote. “While IT spending is not immune to such macro factors, we are not forecasting a material slowdown as we believe enterprises have already been cautious regarding their spending. However, some modest pullback should be expected, particularly post a seasonally strong end to the year.”

BMO Capital analyst Karl Keirstead didn’t agree with Hilal on that point. “Given some weak recent data points from Red Hat, Salesforce.com, Intel and Accenture, we conclude that the macro IT spending backdrop in fact weakened and that the miss was not related to Oracle execution or share losses,” he wrote in a note to clients this morning. “We assumed that Oracle could manage through this tightness and we were obviously wrong.” He lowered his price target to $32 from $38 but maintained a “buy” rating.

Other analysts downgraded Oracle, too. Societé Generale analyst Richard Nguyen cut it to “Hold” from “Buy.” CLSA slashed Oracle shares to “underperform” from “buy,” and lowered its price target to $30 from $36. Deutsche Bank analyst Thomas Ernst lowered his target price to $29 from $33. It’s just one of those days.

But, it appears that well has dried up, at least for a significant number of investors and analysts. The stock is off more than 10 percent on Friday and even those analysts who have been bullish on the company’s prospects are starting to sour.

A number of firms cut their ratings or price targets following the company’s dismal earnings report and an even more faith-sapping conference call.

Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair summed things up pretty well in a research note titled “Bad to Worse.”

“The core problem for RIM in the quarter is that only one of their new products sold well,” he wrote, also bemoaning the company’s continued investment in the money-burning PlayBook before pulling his hair out over the fact that the first phones using the company’s next-generation operating system are delayed until the end of next year. And Blair had actually been briefly bullish on the company’s prospects earlier this year.

“After holding a negative opinion of RIM for the bulk of this year, we had a positive view about the hopes of this product cycle and anticipated it would lift metrics for two quarters, but we were wrong as it didn’t even last for one,” Blair wrote.

In midday trading, the company’s shares fell 5 percent to $22.09 a share. Even so, that’s up from late last month, when the Chicago company traded as low as $15.24 a share, or roughly half of what some investors paid on day one.

The company is like a student in high school who still needs to push in order to get accepted into an Ivy League school. Even though it’s likely a shoo-in — and it’s already gone public — there’s no leeway for senioritis.

Most of the analysts’ evaluations were concerned about risks, such as the company’s short operating history, the prospects for growth now that it has gotten so large and intense competition coming from peers like LivingSocial, Amazon and Google among many others.

“While much execution lies ahead in order to meet expectations, the opportunity is large and Groupon has competitive advantages,” according to Barclays Capital, which had a neutral rating and a price target of $27.

J.P. Morgan also gave Groupon a neutral rating, but set a lower price target of $24 a share because there was still a lot to do despite its first-mover advantage.

“As subscriber growth slows, we project a major profitability ramp for Groupon over the next two years. However, we believe this ramp is largely anticipated and its magnitude leaves little room for error in execution and operations at current levels,” the analyst wrote.

Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney had the harshest words, saying he was “waiting for a better deal.”

He attributed his neutral stance and $24 price target to the lack of success in the company’s new segments, such as real-time offers, vacation packages and physical goods. “That, we believe, could take significant time to prove out,” Mahaney explained.

Nearly all the analysts were also concerned about the upcoming expiration date for a lock-up period. Expected in May 2012, it would allow some early investors and employees to dump the stock.

In other words, we could see a lot of people cashing in their vouchers right as the offer expires.

But don’t expect Amazon to crack open the books to provide anything more concrete than that, even during the company’s third-quarter earnings report, being released tomorrow.

The Seattle-based e-commerce giant has yet to provide numbers on how well its lineup of Kindles is selling, and that’s not likely to change.

For the most part, Amazon doesn’t share these figures because it doesn’t have to. Piper Jaffray Analyst Gene Munster points out that the Kindle is a fairly small part of Amazon’s business and, according to his best guess, makes up only about 4 percent of revenues.

And if Amazon doesn’t have to disclose sales, why would it want to? The numbers would only tip off Apple and Barnes & Noble on how well its tablet business is doing.

But expect Amazon to be under increasing pressure to start divulging more information as the Kindle makes a greater impact on its bottom line.

Analyst Mark Mahaney of Citi largely expects the third and fourth quarters to be strong; however, his guidance is lower compared to the Street consensus because of the financial hit the Kindle Fire launch could have on earnings.

“There is the distinct possibility that an aggressive/successful Fire launch could materially negatively impact AMZN’s margins and EPS near-term,” he wrote in a note to investors.

He expects a profit of 19 cents a share on revenues of $10.8 billion. The Street’s consensus is a profit of 24 cents a share on revenues of $10.9 billion.

As an indication of how well the full lineup of Kindle devices is selling, the top seven bestsellers in Amazon’s electronics store are Kindles of different shapes and sizes.

The Kindle Fire, which ships Nov. 15, is the most expensive and has been in the top slot for the past 27 days. The next best-selling Kindle is the cheapest model, at $79.

J.P. Morgan is estimating that in the fourth quarter, Amazon could sell five million Fires.

But all those sales may not be the best of news.

The Kindle Fire could result in lower earnings because of its aggressive price point. At just $199, it costs less than half of Apple’s entry-level iPad, which makes it appealing to the mass audience. But Amazon could be losing about $50 per Fire, according to some estimates.

However, the lower margin could be offset by the company’s new “offers” business, which basically places advertising on the devices to subsidize the cost of the hardware.

For example, the Kindle Touch with Special Offers costs only $99, but if you want one without ads, it costs $40 more. The new Kindle, without a touchscreen, costs $109 — or $79 for the ad-subsidized model. It’s not clear at this time if the Fire will ship with offers or not.

The offers appear on the device’s screensaver and do not appear while reading the text of a book or at any other time. They are sold by both Amazon and LivingSocial, which is second to Groupon in the deals niche and backed by Amazon.

Tomorrow, after the markets close, Yahoo will announce its third-quarter earnings, perhaps one of its more important reports in recent years.

Wall Street analysts are expecting the Silicon Valley Internet giant to report earnings of 17 cents per share on $1.07 billion in revenues.

But whether or not Yahoo has beat expectations will be less scrutinized than information about the state of Yahoo’s key search and display advertising businesses, as well as other user metrics.

It is at those numbers that a range of players — including major shareholders, possible bidders and media — will be looking to see just how badly the company’s business has fared with all the turmoil of late.

That has included the firing of its CEO Carol Bartz, a massive strategic review that includes the possibility of a sale to a range of mostly private equity buyers, a persistent attrition problem and a worry that the company continues to drift in its product innovation, even as others have surged.

Last week, I reported that Yahoo had finally selected an executive search firm to help it find a new CEO, which many think is a difficult task given the uncertain situation.

A series of worrisome trends across its ad businesses over several recent quarters has some looking at the company for possible purchase with some skepticism.

“What if it is too broken to fix, what if trends to Google’s and Facebook’s premium offerings is too overwhelming?” said one potential bidder for Yahoo. “There are a lot of what-ifs at Yahoo.”

By comparison, Google posted impressive earnings last week.

Yahoo stock closed at $15.70 today, down 1.3 percent.

In a statement that seems not to have circulated as an official press release, but was emailed to a few U.K.-based tech journalists such as Chris Mellor at the Register, Lynch gives a more detailed account of the real reason for his “trip to SF” and his meeting in April with Oracle president Mark Hurd.

On one of my trips to SF (April 2011), Frank Quattrone, whom I have known for a long time, offered to introduce me to Mark Hurd. Oracle was a customer and I have never met him, so it was a good opportunity. Frank does this from time to time on my visits, he has introduced me to many people… NOTE: Frank was not engaged by Autonomy and there was no process running. The company was not for sale. I recall meeting with Mark and someone else I believe called Doug. At the start of the meeting they joked that Frank was there to sell them something. Frank and I made it clear that was not the case. We then met and had a lively discussion about database technologies. The meeting lasted approximately 30 mins. Frank is happy to confirm this.

Oracle’s corporate communications department, working unusually late, issued a retort that crossed the wires sometime after 1 am ET, calling Lynch’s statement “another whopper.”

It was no “lively discussion of database technologies,” Oracle says. Why bring two PowerPoint decks all devoted to Autonomy’s financial performance? Oracle, making good on last night’s implied threat to publish the decks, did so, and you can see them for yourself below.

Oracle published the slides in hope, it says, of restoring Lynch’s memory of a meeting he initially said never took place. “Yesterday, the Autonomy CEO did not remember having any meeting with Oracle,” the company said. “Today, he remembers the April meeting and inaccurately describes how it came about and what was discussed. Tomorrow, he will need to explain his slides.”

The kerfuffle is over Lynch’s defense of a comment Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made on a conference call with analysts last week. Asked about the current buzzword “unstructured data” and Oracle’s capabilities around it, Ellison engaged in his favorite hobby and took a jab at Hewlett-Packard — which last month said it would acquire Autonomy in a deal valued at $11.7 billion. “Autonomy was a shock to us. We looked at the price and thought it was absurdly high. We had no interest in making the Autonomy acquisition,” he said then.

He also went on to say that unstructured data can readily be added to Oracle’s existing database technology. “We think we’re much better off with a couple of smaller acquisitions and to continue to innovate in that area, so that the unstructured data and the structured data both find their way into an Oracle Database,” he said.

That, of course, didn’t sit well with Lynch, who has so far quietly endured criticism that HP is overpaying for Autonomy. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, he denied that Autonomy was ever shopped to Oracle, and characterized Ellison’s understanding of the unstructured data problem as “very weak.”

Those, of course, were fighting words to Oracle, which decided to remind him of his April meeting with Hurd and Oracle’s M&A head Douglas Kehring.

It’s also helpful to remember that late last year Autonomy was being mentioned as the target of a bidding war between Oracle and Microsoft, according to a rumor-based story planted in the U.K.’s Daily Mail. Though such stories based on “takeover chatter” occur practically every day, someone with some skin in the game clearly wanted the markets to think Oracle was kicking Autonomy’s tires.

Lynch, of course, is really a proxy for HP’s new CEO Meg Whitman and Chairman Ray Lane, who have to get the Autonomy deal done and live with the price that former CEO Léo Apotheker agreed to pay for it. I asked Whitman about it last week, and she said “It is what it is.” The most interesting thing that has emerged from all this, however, is that Oracle claims to have considered Autonomy overpriced at a $6 billion valuation. HP paid almost twice that. Game on.

Autonomy Presentation 1 503341

Autonomy Presentation 2 503342

Cisco also did what many analysts have been urging for some months and reduced its long-term growth targets to levels it has a better chance of meeting. It said it now expects revenue to grow annually at 5 to 7 percent through 2014 and called for operating margins in the 25 percent range, which is pretty much in line with what some analysts had suggested.

So were they convinced? A little. John Marchetti of Cowen and Co. called it “a positive analyst day.” The more aggressive stance versus competitors and the realistic targets should give the shares a “boost over the near term,” he wrote in a note to clients today. While Cisco’s valuation, which is at about nine times Marchetti’s forward EPS for the 2012 calendar year, is arguably low, he kept his rating at neutral. “Shares look cheap,” he said, “but we do not see a near-term catalyst to drive the stock higher and believe the muted growth outlook and macro-headwinds especially in light of Cisco’s exposure to government and European customers.”

Sanjiv Wadhwani of Stifel Nicolaus was more convinced. In a note to clients today he wrote that “the worst seems to be behind” Cisco following a product transition in its switching business that was responsible for at least part of its troubles over the last few quarters. Moreover, the pricing environment in switching — which had been driven down in part by an aggressive Hewlett-Packard campaign and profit margins on many of its switching products — are “approaching historical levels.” On top of that, he says Cisco has some moves it can make to trim some operational expense — he called them “opex levers” — to make sure that per-share earnings grow faster than sales. He rates Cisco shares a buy with a $20 price target.

Cisco sees Juniper as being “spread too thin” in the marketplace right now, Wadhwani writes. But Cisco’s line of attack won’t necessarily be lower prices. Indeed, the opposite may be true, he wrote: Cisco “will intensely focus on gross margins going forward.”

But that’s not to say there won’t be other weapons, like marketing trash talk. Here’s a sample: Cisco has launched a site where it accuses Juniper of “overpromising and under-delivering.” If there’s more to come like this — frankly, from both sides — the fight should be fun to watch.

Additionally, Chambers (pictured from his interview at D5) will likely lay out his plan to get Cisco growing again, following a restructuring that saw 6,500 jobs eliminated, and certain parts of the company — in particular, the Flip video camera business – shut down.

Financial analysts have been agitating for Cisco to take down its long-term financial models for most of the year, and since they’ll be the ones in the audience today, Chambers would be nuts not to address their concerns. The model may seem like a small detail, but analysts rely upon these forecasts in order to help them calibrate their expectations, and thus help their clients make better investment decisions going forward.

One recent suggestion for how the new model should look came from Gleacher analyst Brian Marshall in a note to clients on Aug. 11. He suggested that Cisco could realistically forecast annual revenue growth of 10 percent and an operating margin of 25 percent. Currently, he says, Cisco’s long-term growth models call for sales to grow annually in the 12 to 17 percent range, with operating margins in the range of 28 to 31 percent. Over the last five calendar years, he wrote, Cisco has averaged revenue growth of 11 percent — worse if you exclude growth from acquisitions — and operating margins just shy of 29 percent.

But it won’t all be numbers and figures today. Alongside the analysts meeting, Cisco will be talking about some new server technology it has developed internally using the UCS computing platform it developed with EMC and VMWare. Cisco has opened up a data center in Raleigh, N.C., that it says is being used for two things — applications development and disaster recovery.

Now, if you don’t know anything about disaster recovery, allow me to explain why that’s a big deal. The typical way companies use disaster recovery is to have a second data center — essentially a carbon copy of the first one that’s used day in and day out — sitting on standby, waiting for the day when it is needed. And while it’s critical to have when the power goes out at your primary site, or some natural disaster like a tornado strikes, it’s also expensive. Disaster recovery hardware sits around doing nothing important, while at the same time racking up costs for power, maintenance and floor space. Wouldn’t it be great if you could use it productively, too?

Cisco has figured out a way to do exactly that, and will demonstrate it today. The data center, which is in Research Triangle Park, has been set up to support application development on a daily basis, but if disaster strikes one of Cisco’s other main data centers — its sites in Texas, for instance — it can be turned around within 24 hours and serve as a disaster recovery site. Oddly, Cisco is demonstrating this mainly as a way of showing off what UCS can do, and it’s also sharing the particulars with customers. It is not, however, offering it as part of a new product or service.

Cisco shares are still trading in the midteens, down from a 52-week high of $24.60 in November. The shares are showing new signs of life, however. Having bounced off the bottom of a 52-week low of $13.30 last month, they’re starting to climb again. And yesterday Cisco rose 54 cents, or more than three percent, to $16.09. Investors seem hopeful that there will be a better outlook from Cisco today.

Shares in rival Dell, on the other hand, had a pretty good day, surging 85 cents, or more than 5 percent, to close at $16.75 after its earnings showed some progress in its long sought turnaround.

While HP suffered from consumer PC sales that fell by 23 percent, CEO Léo Apotheker also complained about weak profit margins in HP’s services group, promised to fix that and essentially blamed former CEO Mark Hurd for “failing to execute in the past.”

The services story was completely the opposite at Dell. Its acquisition of Perot Systems two years ago, for instance, has propelled its services business toward higher margins.

Analysts wasted no time issuing a barrage of downgrades on HP and upgrades on Dell.

“Time for the Tomfoolery to end,” was the subtitle of a research note from Brian Marshall at Gleacher and Co.

“Historically known for its consistent performance and operational excellence, HP is now associated with more undesirable attributes,” including management changes, lowering of guidance, and internal leaks, he wrote. “In our view, the investment community holds sacrosanct both consistency and lack of surprises from its portfolio companies. Unfortunately HPQ is delivering neither currently, resulting in roughly a 50% discount to the S&P 500.” A stinging rebuke, indeed, though Marshall maintained a Buy rating on HP shares, based on the price, but lowered his target price to $50 from $54.

Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore, who earlier in the week had been relatively bullish on both HP and Dell, took down his price target on HP to $36 from $40 and reduced his forecasts to reflect its new guidance. There will be, he wrote in a research note to clients issued today, “no quick fix” to HP’s services business. Its plans to hire a new head of services and to invest in more profitable offerings will take 12 to 24 months if not longer. “In the interim, we expect growth and margins to remain under pressure.”

Robert Cihra of Caris and Co. cut his rating on HP to “below average” from average and worried about its long-term financial guidance. He slashed his forecasts, and now predicts HP’s profits to grow only 2 percent in fiscal year 2012. Much of HP’s per-share earnings, he says, came from share buybacks, something he thinks HP should stop doing in order to preserve cash for acquisitions. Its balance sheet currently shows about $12.7 billion in cash and cash equivalents.

Compare these to some of the comments on Dell.

Andy Hargreaves of Pacific Crest Securities wrote in a note to clients that Dell’s gross product margins are higher now than at any time since 1994, this despite lousy consumer demand for PCs and friction around sales of storage products that caused revenue, at $15 billion, to fall a little short of his $15.6 billion estimate. “Dell’s management has shown considerable dedication to its pricing controls and supply-chain management,” he wrote.

Shaw Wu of Sterne Agee applauded Dell for the unexpectedly strong results, but not without reservations. “As much as we would like to join the bull bandwagon, three issues surrounding its big gross margin upside give us hesitation,” he wrote in a note to clients today.

First, Dell’s comment that the strength in enterprise was a key reason for the upside–enterprise amounted to only 30 percent of sales, up only slightly from 28 percent a year ago. Second, prices on hard drives and displays have been rising recently, and historically, Dell’s gross profit margins have been tied closely to the cost of the components it buys, so he wonders why that’s not the case now. Third, Dell’s overall gross margin of 23.2 percent is as close as it has ever been in recent memory to HP’s recent gross margin high of 24.6 percent, and yet their product mix is as different as night and day. Dell’s business is about 70 percent PCs and 30 percent enterprise, while it’s more or less the opposite at HP. The concerns led Wu to rate Dell “neutral,” saying, “We remain concerned with the company’s longer-term fundamental position and believe the company needs to take more aggressive steps to reinvent itself.”

Paul Otellini, Intel’s chief executive, told analysts at a meeting in Santa Clara, Calif., on Tuesday that the “centerpoint”–or the average power used by Intel’s chips–in the past was around 35 to 40 watts. Intel is now shifting that down to about 15 watts, with the change being implemented over the next several years.

Meanwhile, Mr. Otellini reiterated Intel’s bullish guidance for the second quarter, saying the view is “still right on” and PC growth should be “pretty good” this year despite what other companies–like PC maker Hewlett-Packard Co.–have said.

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Yesterday, Jeff Jordan, the company’s president and CEO, unexpectedly stepped down from his job at the online restaurant reservation leader. Boomtown’s Kara Swisher reported that he is likely to take a job at Andreessen Horowitz, a major venture capital firm in Silicon Valley.

Up until this week, the company’s stock was something of a Wall Street darling.

Over the past year, the stock jumped 322 percent, trading as high as $118.66 at its peak. Today, the shares fell to as little as $87.23 during the day. In the past two days alone, the stock has lost almost $24 a share.

OpenTable said the company’s CFO, Matthew Roberts, will be promoted to president and CEO and will join the board. At the same time, Jordan will become executive chairman. The transition will take place on June 1. Roberts will also fill the role of CFO until a replacement is found.

The sudden departure led analysts to voice concern over the urgency of the changes, including Roberts’s ability to manage three jobs at once. The company also reported first-quarter results today that were in line with expectations.