Fortinet Inc. (NASDAQ: FTNT) absolutely crushed its earnings Wednesday after the markets closed; now analysts are clamoring to update their position on this cybersecurity company. 24/7 Wall St. has put together some of the recent ratings and research that analysts have been throwing around, as well as adding some color.

Needless to say, most analysts were fairly positive on Fortinet as the company has had a massive year, shares are up about 38% year to date and over 70% in just the past 52 weeks.

Oppenheimer reiterated an Outperform rating and raised its price target to $55 from $50, implying an upside of 15.5% from current prices. The firm raised its price target based on an ongoing strong performance that was driven by high-end enterprise appliances seeing further acceleration, fruition of ongoing internal investment, and improved guidance calls.

The company continues to experience increased large deal activity. The number of large deals over $100,000 grew 53% year over year, and deals over $1 million grew 133%. The U.S. enterprise business grew 90% year over year. At the same time, billings grew 40% year over year to $297.2 million, exceeding consensus $265.2 million estimate, while mid- and high-end appliances continued to account for more than 69% of overall billings. All geographies reported strong year over year growth, with the Americas ~39% and EMEA ~33%.

For fiscal 2015, Oppenheimer raised its estimates to $1.01 billion in revenue and $0.52 in earnings per share (EPS) from $924 million and $0.51 in EPS. For fiscal 2016 the firm’s estimates rise to revenues of $1.30 billion and $0.71 in EPS from $1.13 billion and $0.64 in EPS. This was the result of Fortinet guiding to $255 million to $260 million in revenues and $0.12 in EPS for the third quarter with billings in the range of $285 million to $295 million.

Merrill Lynch increased its fiscal 2015 and fiscal 2016 revenue estimates to reflect strong secular demand trends, tail winds from product upgrades, and share gains from deeper vertical penetration. The firm maintained its Buy rating and increased its price objective to $51 from $47.

The numbers may be somewhat conservative, as the bulk of new hiring was completed over the last two quarters with productivity gains likely to materialize in the near future, according to Merrill Lynch. The firm also noted that management exceeded its own operating margin guidance by ~300 bps in each of the last two quarters.

The brokerage firm gave its investment rationale as:

We view Fortinet as a strong player in the Unified Threat Management (UTM) space long term. We believe the company will continue to demonstrate strong price/performance value proposition due to its differentiated custom ASIC based products. We see this, along with new product introductions based on the NP6 ASIC, as driving both a replacement cycle and opening new opportunities in the high end data center market given its competitive firewall throughput.

A smattering of other analysts weighed in on Fortinet after earnings as well:

• Barclays has an Overweight rating and raised its price target to $53 from $50.
• FBN reiterated a Buy rating.
• FBR has an Outperform rating and raised its price target to $52 from $44.
• JPMorgan upgraded Fortinet to an Overweight rating from Neutral with a $54 price target.
• Needham has a Buy rating and raised its price target to $54 from $48.
• Piper Jaffray reiterated a Buy rating.
• RBC has a Sector Perform rating and raised its price target to $48 from $40.
• Baird has a Hold rating with a $50 price target.
• Topeka Capital Markets has a Hold rating and raised its price target to $46 from $39.
• Wunderlich has a Buy rating and raised its price target to $56 from $48.

Shares of Fortinet were up 12.6% at $47.62 on Thursday afternoon after hitting a new all-time high. The stock has a consensus analyst price target of $44.41 and a new 52-week trading range of $23.08 to $47.83.

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