Jefferies Says Software Is Cheap and Should Outperform: 4 to Buy Now

January 25, 2016 by Lee Jackson

The only good thing about blistering wicked sell-offs is they provide opportunity, especially when the economy is most likely not headed for recession. While many of the perma-bears are now out of their dens and prowling, the state of the market is not all that bad. With many of the indicators strategists look to for clues to direction indicating that upside could be close at hand, it’s a good time for investors to consider some selective buying.

A new Jefferies research note point outs that with the recent selling and pullback factored in, a higher percentage of software stocks are trading below the intrinsic value of their recurring revenue streams alone than over the past three years. In other words, the good companies are cheap. We screened the Jefferies software coverage universe and found four stocks rated Buy with the biggest upside to the Jefferies price targets.

Check Point Software Technologies

This remains one of the top tech stocks to buy on Wall Street for a security presence, and it is said to be in talks with CyberArk. Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (NASDAQ: CHKP) is one of the best in helping customers protect against advanced persistent threats. It is considered a worldwide leader in securing the Internet, providing customers with uncompromising protection against all types of threats, reducing security complexity and lowering the total cost of ownership. Check Point first pioneered the industry with FireWall-1 and its patented stateful inspection technology.

The revenue growth rate has accelerated almost every quarter over the past year and a half. Many on Wall Street think that Check Point should see year-over-year accelerating growth in product licenses, particularly as the security firewall refresh appears to be in the beginning stages. Acquiring CyberArk could add a fresh product offering to the company’s already industry leading portfolio.

The company reported outstanding third-quarter results on strong demand for its advanced threat prevention and mobile security technologies.

The Jefferies price target for the stock is $100. The Thomson/First Call consensus price target is $92.82. The stock closed Friday at $75.43.


Commvault Systems

This stock is down 25% since mid-December. Commvault Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: CVLT) is a leading provider of data protection and information management solutions, helping companies worldwide activate their data to drive more value and business insight and to transform modern data environments. With solutions and services delivered directly and through a worldwide network of partners and service providers, Commvault solutions comprise one of the industry’s leading portfolios in data protection and recovery, cloud, virtualization, archive, file sync and share.

The company’s exclusive single-platform architecture gives companies unprecedented control over data growth, costs and risk. Commvault’s Simpana software suite of products was designed to work together seamlessly from the ground up, sharing a single code and common function set, to deliver superlative data protection, archive, replication, search and resource management capabilities.

Over the past year, the company announced numerous additions to its product portfolio that enable organizations to thrive in the next wave of cloud adoption by turning data residing in public and hybrid clouds into a powerful strategic information asset. With the release of Commvault Cloud Disaster Recovery, Commvault Cloud Development and Test, Commvault Cloud Gateway and Commvault Cloud Replication, the company is addressing several critical needs demanded by enterprises today.

Some on Wall Street make the case that at this cheap level, the company could be a takeover candidate, as other peers have been.

Jefferies has a $45 price target, and the consensus target is $43.25. Shares closed Friday at $31.62.
Qlik Technologies

This is another top company and is down 40% since last fall. Qlik Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: QLIK) QlikView Business Discovery platform lets people quickly bring data sources together to create dynamic visual applications that can be navigated and searched intuitively. QlikView uses Natural Analytics to reflect the way human curiosity searches and processes information, while delivering the enterprise manageability, governance and service offerings organizations require.

Qlik Technologies was named last spring the top “cross-industry” vendor in the KLAS Report, “Healthcare Analytics: Moving Toward the Continuum of Care” for having the best understanding of health care analytics and for being considered one of the most important vendors to a customer’s organization in terms of its future business intelligence and analytics plans.

The company’s new Qlik Sense product, which has helped push the company in the business intelligence and analytic market, is seeing strong demand trends as the second-quarter licensing total of $76.3 million was much higher than estimates and the strongest since 2011. New customer license and maintenance billings were up strong last year, and are expected to grow again in 2016.

The $46 Jefferies price target is greater than the consensus target of $41.92. The stock closed Friday at $26.58.

VMware

This company is down a stunning 47% since August. VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW) provides virtualization infrastructure solutions in the United States and internationally. Its 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.

Of course the big issue is how the stock will trade going forward as a result of the Dell deal with EMC, which was a concern even before the deal surfaced. Jefferies has said in the past that it feels that VMware will continue to trade at a discount to intrinsic value because of the overhang. While acknowledging the continuing headline risk, the firm also feels that business is surprisingly resilient and that the company continues to sign deals

While the Jefferies price target is $83, the consensus target is $74.93. The stock closed Friday at $49.50.


Not only are prices currently cheap, but Jefferies also expects that some of the headwinds from the strong U.S. dollar could start to abate this year. With the potential to outperform in 2016, these stocks make good sense for aggressive growth portfolios.

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