The UBS team reports that there is continuing high interest from enterprises around the world, and the discussions centered on everything from sustaining the continued robust demand to the ability to hire qualified talent and the corporate appetite for security analytics to lessen alert fatigue around threat detection. Four top stocks to buy now at UBS are FireEye Inc. (NASDAQ: FEYE), Fortinet Inc. (NASDAQ: FTNT), Palo Alto Networks Inc. (NYSE: PANW) and Splunk Inc. (NASDAQ: SPLK).
FireEye
FireEye continues to grow, and most Wall Street analysts think it may have resolved its channel conflict with Mandiant, yet its overall performance was somewhat mixed in recent value added reseller survey results. The company did garner 30% of the advanced persistent threat (APT) category, and other Wall Street analysts are very bullish on the prospects.
Earlier this year FireEye announced the new release of FireEye Email Threat Prevention Cloud that adds the traditional email security features of anti-spam and antivirus protection to its advanced threat detection capabilities.
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FireEye announced this week a huge partnership with tech giant Hewlett-Packard to develop an advanced suite of network threat detection and analysis software. The two companies said they will develop an industry standard architecture for providing customers with “a blueprint” for threat protection.
UBS has the stock with a strong $50 target price. The Thomson/First Call consensus price target is lower at $43.90, but shares closed Thursday at $43.93.
Fortinet
This top company is well liked on Wall Street, and analysts have pointed to three specific reasons for the bullish posture:
- The large push into enterprise and OMP
- The impact of the improved inventory management
- The new “Easy 4” pricing model released earlier this year that involves a new bundled product sales strategy
Fortinet shareholders were delighted this week as the company posted earnings that beat first-quarter expectations, forecast revenue this quarter higher and raised its full-year outlook above consensus. Wall Street also cheered as the company said the tone of business is very strong, and CEO Ken Xie believes demand for network security software solutions is the strongest “in 20 years.”
The UBS has a price target of $43, and the consensus target is $41.09. Shares closed Thursday at $38.72.
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Palo Alto Networks
Palo Alto Networks has been a momentum trader’s dream over the past year and continues to show up well with resellers. It was reported to have the highest percentage share in the highly competitive firewall bake-offs at 42%. The company also ranked highest with the Wildfire product, which was the favorite in the APT space among the value added resellers with 43%.
The company is helping to lead a new era in cybersecurity by protecting thousands of enterprise, government and service provider networks from cyberthreats, and it boasted a staggering year-over-year billing growth. Unlike fragmented legacy products, its security platform safely enables business operations and delivers protection based on what matters most in today’s dynamic computing environments: applications, users and content.
UBS has a $162 price target, and the consensus target is set at $165.32. The stock closed trading Thursday at $154.78 a share.
Splunk
This company appears to be on the rise with many on Wall Street, and some of the retailer survey data gives a good indication on why. A very large 26% of the resellers surveyed believe the company is the best positioned in the industry to capitalize on customer interest in security analytics, an area that could price to be gigantic in the years to come.
The company provides the leading software platform for real-time operational intelligence. Splunk software and cloud services enable organizations to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine-generated big data coming from websites, applications, servers, networks, sensors and mobile devices. This helps when looking for true security issues and false alarms, among other things.
The UBS price target is set at $82, and the consensus target is $79.97. The shares closed on Thursday at $67.81 apiece.
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Clearly the scope of security importance has gained huge traction. Though pricing is stable to lower, the sheer number of products being sold looks to be increasing, and increasing fast. This will be an important technology silo for years to come most likely, and aggressive growth accounts ought to consider adding a position.
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