Flash Memory Provider Violin Memory Closes Down 22% In Public Market Debut While Cloud Service RingCentral Finishes Up 45% In IPO

RingCentral  finished its first day of trading up 45% after pricing its IPO at $13 per share. Violin Memory closed down 22% in its debut on the public markets.

Violin Memory, a Flash memory provider, trading as “VMEM,” priced its IPO Thursday night to open at $9 per share but opened at $7.41, 17.7 percent lower than the IPO price. It closed at $7.02 per share. RingCentral, trading as “RNG,” was priced at $13 per share. The stock closes at $18.20 per share.

Taken together, the two are examples of the quite diverse types of companies that are considered in the enterprise category and their relative dominance as IPOs in the tech sector. But these are also not the hottest of IPOs, signaling a change in the tenor about how enterprise companies might fare in the public markets.

RingCentral provides a way to deliver phone and fax services with its clous service.  Violin Memory’s Flash-memory technology is used in on-premise enterprise operations to bolster the performance of applications and manage the process of large amounts of data.

The market has not been bullish about Violin. The company has raised $268 million, a considerable amount coming from Toshiba, which Violin leveraged for its play in the market. In the past year though, its star has fallen to some degree. HP, once its biggest customer, has not renewed its contract.

On the other hand, the mood has been upbeat for RingCentral. The company has pleased Wall Street with consistent increases in revenues over the past few years. Founded in 1999, RingCentral has $44 million in funding. It raised its first $12 million round in 2007 from Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital. According to public documents, the company  posted revenues in 2012 of $114.5 million. In 2011, it had revenues of $78.9 million and $50.2 million in 2010.

A number of enterprise companies have had IPOs in the past 18 months. Last week, FireEye shares jumped $16 for the security company. In total it raised nearly $304 million, giving it a market cap of $2.3 billion.

Earlier this year, Tableau Software raises $254 million in its IPO whie Marketo raised $85 million at a $550 million valuation.

In July 2012, Palo Alto Networks raised $260 million and HR specialist Workday’s IPO in October 2012 raised $637 million.