NetApp (NTAP): Raising PT After Insight 2016 Conference - Baird

Baird analyst, Jayson Noland, reiterated his Outperform rating on shares of NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) after the company's Insight 2016 conference.

CEO Kurian gave a keynote address Monday evening emphasizing the shift from HDD to Flash and silos to scale-out. The company cited its recent move to No.2 in the All-Flash Array market and said firmly that it intends to be No.1 which would require substantial market share gain relative to Dell/EMC.

NetApp spent a lot of time discussing its Data Fabric. The company is essentially building a data management platform that would allow a customer to manage data on-premise in the corporate data center or at an off-premise public cloud. NetApp is also adding services that sit on the Data Fabric but management said pricing is mostly yet-to-be-determined.

The company was bullish on the continued success of All-Flash FAS and the ramp of SolidFire. Management expects AFA to remain aggressively price competitive but believes it can take share from EMC and competitors with “unsustainable” business models.

New product announcements included:

- Cloud Sync. NetApp's new Cloud Sync data management solution facilitates seamless synchronization between on-prem systems and AWS cloud storage.

- Ontap Cloud. The company announced expanded support for software-only deployments of its ONTAP operating system on the AWS public cloud, which is in addition to existing Microsoft Azure support.

- FlexGroup. FlexGroup is NetApp's new infinite-scale distributed container-based file system available through ONTAP 9.

- Flash Solutions. NetApp introduced several new arrays to its flash lineup promising radical improvements in cost and density with 15TB SSD support, and dramatically higher performance through hybrid NVMe caching. New arrays will support both 32Gb Fibre Channel and 40Gb Ethernet SAN connectivity.

The price target is increased to $37 from $32 based on ~13x F17E EPS giving NetApp credit for 50% of the net cash position.

For an analyst ratings summary and ratings history on NetApp click here. For more ratings news on NetApp click here.

Shares of NetApp closed at $35.34 yesterday.

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