Jefferies Intiates Coverage On Software Companies

Jefferies initiated coverage on software companies Thursday and saw the industry as one of the “most promising environments for innovation” that the analysts have seen in their years covering the space.

Analysts led by John DiFucci believed “the Software sector is riding a wave of relevance on the back of what most investors appear to be much less interested in: the advances of foundational computing technologies over the last decade, including much faster and cheaper memory, multi-core processors that enable the use of that memory, much faster, cheaper and broader bandwidth.”

The firm initiated coverage on the following companies with ratings and price targets:

Adobe ADBE Buy, $83 price target
Benefitfocus BNFT Buy, $29 price target
CA Technologies CA Buy, $40 price target
Check Point Software CHKP Buy, $88 price target
Intuit INTU Buy, $110 price target
Paycom PAYC Buy, $32 price target
Qlik Technologies QLIK Buy, $40 price target
RingCentral RNG Buy, $20 price target
SolarWinds SWI Buy, $60 price target
Splunk SPLK Buy, $89 price target
SS&C Technologies SSNC Buy, $58 price target
Varonis VRNS Buy, $30 price target
VMware VMW Buy, $130 price target

Microsoft MSFT Underperform, $40 price target
salesforce.com CRM Underperform, $48 price target
Symantec SYMC Underperform, $20 price target

Citrix CTXS Hold, $64 price target
CommVault CVLT Hold, $50 price target
Oracle ORCL Hold, $41price target
Red Hat RHT Hold, $58 price target
SAP SAP Hold, € 57 price target
Tableau DATA Hold, $90 price target
Workday WDAY Hold, $100 price target