With the election now official, many investors are looking to 2017, and if it is anywhere close to this year, another double-digit gain could be in order. With many managers underweight equities, the current rally feels extended as they rush to add shares before the end of the year. One sector that looks promising for next year is software, which performed well this year, but hardly ran away from the pack.
A new RBC research report features the firm’s top software picks for 2017, and the large cap names the firm is focused on make good sense for aggressive growth accounts looking to add stocks. Five companies make the cut, and all are rated Outperform at RBC.
Adobe Systems
This high-profile old-school software company has been posting outstanding earnings. Adobe Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: ADBE) operates in three segments. The Digital Media segment provides tools and solutions that enable individuals, small and medium businesses, and enterprises to create, publish, promote and monetize their digital content.
The Digital Marketing segment offers solutions for how digital advertising and marketing are created, managed, executed, measured and optimized. This segment provides analytics, social marketing, targeting, media optimization, digital experience management and cross-channel campaign management solutions, as well as video delivery and monetization to digital marketers, advertisers, publishers, merchandisers, Web analysts, chief marketing officers, chief information officers and chief revenue officers.
The Print and Publishing segment offers products and services, such as eLearning solutions, technical document publishing, Web application development and high-end printing, as well as publishing needs of technical and business and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) printing businesses.
The RBC report noted:
Total addressable market or TAM gets larger with 16.9 million core users for Creative, well ahead of the 12.8 million provided two years ago. In addition, the company believes there is an additional 11.7 million potential users driven by growth in the Creative Community, Student and Teacher penetration and conversions from the piracy. Market and Value expansion provide additional upside
Adobe is also reasonably safe route for investors looking to own a company with marketing automation products, which have become huge.
The RBC price target for the stock is $115, and the Wall Street consensus target is $122.05. Shares closed on Tuesday at $105.77.
Salesforce.com
The stock took a hit after choppy fiscal second-quarter numbers, but it has rallied back nicely. Salesforce.com Inc. (NYSE: CRM) provides enterprise cloud computing solutions, with a focus on customer relationship management to various businesses and industries worldwide. It offers enterprise cloud computing applications and platform services, including Sales Cloud that enables companies to store data, monitor leads and progress, forecast opportunities, gain insights through relationship intelligence and collaborate around sales on desktop and mobile devices.
The company also provides Service Cloud, which enables companies to deliver personalized customer service and support, as well as connect their service agents with customers on various devices; and Marketing Cloud, which enables companies to plan, personalize and optimize customer interactions.
RBC said in the research report:
We expect to hear of more success in enterprise accounts as the sales organization under Keith Block begins to find stronger traction. Salesforce has begun launching vertical solutions, such as for financial services and health management, and we expect more to be forthcoming.
RBC has an $85 price target, but the consensus target is up at $94.30. The stock closed Tuesday at $69.86.
ServiceNow
This could be among the fastest growing of the RBC Outperform-rated stocks. ServiceNow Inc. (NYSE: NOW) expects to have 50% of the Global 2000 customers by 2020, adding 15 to 20 each quarter. ServiceNow is the enterprise IT cloud company with a service used to create a single system of record for IT and automate manual tasks, standardize processes and consolidate legacy systems. Using the company’s extensible platform, customers can create custom applications and evolve the IT service model to service domains inside and outside the enterprise.
Customers use the firm’s service model to define, structure and automate the flow of work, removing dependencies on email and spreadsheets to transform the delivery and management of services for the enterprise. Service Now enables service management for every department in the enterprise, including IT, human resources, facilities, field service and more.
According to the RBC report:
We believe 2017 consensus revenue growth of 30% remains conservative following an estimated 38%+ in 2016. We also believe billings should be able to grow north of 30% in 2017 following an estimated 36% in 2016.Both revenue and billings could re-accelerate on a quarter to quarter basis in the first quarter of 2017.
The $95 RBC price target compares with the consensus target of $93.41. The shares closed Tuesday at $78.30.
Red Hat
This top technology stock is another solid pick for aggressive accounts. Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) is the world’s leading provider of open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and virtualization technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training and consulting services.
Last year the company formed a partnership with once bitter rival Microsoft that would bring more flexibility to hybrid cloud enterprise environments. Specifically, the partnership allows cloud products running under the Linux operating system to integrate with Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure, a huge move after years of competition.
The analysts noted:
Unlike the on premise world that still relies heavily on Windows, we believe upwards of 90% of the public cloud runs on Linux (not all RHEL), and many of today’s modern infrastructure concepts such as Containers, are built on Linux. We believe that puts Red Hat in a unique position to benefit from the hybrid cloud (a blend of public and private clouds) as customers increasingly think about application mobility.
RBC set its price target at $95 The consensus target is $90.17, and the stock closed on Tuesday at $79.39.
VMware
Although still down from highs printed in the summer of 2015, the stock has rallied nicely off lows printed last February. VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW) provides virtualization infrastructure solutions in the United States and internationally.
The company’s virtualization infrastructure solutions include a suite of products designed to deliver a software-defined data center run on industry-standard desktop computers and servers, and support a range of operating system and application environments, as well as networking and storage infrastructures. Its solutions enable organizations to aggregate multiple servers, storage infrastructure and networks together into shared pools of capacity.
Top analysts on Wall Street cite the company’s strong balance sheet, with $8.7 billion in cash and short-term securities and a previously announced $1.2 billion stock buyback program that goes through the end of this year. They also point to the synergies in the deal with Dell, where it acquires EMC, which owns a huge 81% position of VMware stock.
RBC cited the deal with Amazon.com’s cloud division, AWS, as a potential positive in the report:
While most believe AWS got the better end of the partnership, we believe it gives customers a path to leverage their private cloud technology in the public cloud. VMware recently announced it will be partnering with AWS on a new hybrid service VMware Cloud on AWS. AWS is working on building a new infrastructure to run vSphere for enterprise workloads. Management feels most customers’ public cloud is housed on AWS and private cloud is VMware, so it’s a natural partnership for hybrid cloud in management’s opinion.
The $90 RBC price target is higher than the consensus estimate of $80.63. The shares closed Tuesday above that level at $81.86.
These top companies are all solid growers and look poised for a great 2017. Given the huge run in the markets since the election, investors may want to buy partial positions and see if we don’t get a pullback early in 2017.
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