Evercore ISI Reiterates IBM (IBM) at Buy on Confluent deal rumors

Evercore ISI analyst Amit Daryanani reiterated an Outperform rating and $315.00 price target on IBM (NYSE: IBM).

The analyst commented; "The Wall Street Journal is reporting that IBM is looking to acquire Confluent and the deal could be announced as early as Monday (12/8). WSJ notes that the deal would value Confluent at $11B (vs. $8B market cap as of Friday close); this implies an ~8x EV/CY26 revenue multiple. Confluent, a cloud-native AI data infrastructure software company built around Apache Kafka, provides technology that helps manage streams of real-time data used in big artificial-intelligence models. At $11B, this would be one of the larger softer deals IBM has done and will come on the heels of them closing the HashiCorp deal for $6.5B in early CY25. Strategically, a potential acquisition of CFLT fits with IBM’s focus on infrastructure software assets within the open source ecosystem. There has been a fair amount of focus on IBM’s narrative in CY26 and how they can grow in ’26 given the difficult compares that they have (Hashi, Mainframe, f/x, etc.); assuming a deal takes place, we view the would view it as a positive that helps reinforce IBM’s market leadership in infrastructure software while contributing to their growth profile. Net/net: Sticking with our OP rating on IBM and $315 Target. "

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

Shares of IBM closed at $307.94 yesterday.

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