Raymond James reiterated a Strong Buy rating and $33.00 price target on Nimble Storage (NYSE: NMBL) ahead of the company's 2Q16 earnings results. Analyst Brian Alexander expects a slight upside to consensus revenue and EPS, similar to last quarter. Guidance should be slightly above consensus for October. NMBL is scheduled to release its 2Q16 earnings report on August 25th.

Alexander commented, "We maintain our Strong Buy rating and $33 price target on NMBL ahead of F2Q16 (July) results, to be reported Tuesday, August 25. We expect slight upside to consensus revenue and EPS, similar to last quarter. Guidance should be slightly above consensus for October and our above-consensus revenue estimate assumes 47% y/y revenue growth. Operating losses should materially improve in F3Q16 (we estimate a $3 million operating loss) and exceed breakeven in F4Q for the first time. Our 2Q15 IT Supply Chain Survey, along with data points from public storage companies, suggest a growing divide between legacy and emerging storage vendors. Feedback on Nimble momentum remains constructive. We believe enhancements to Nimble’s Adaptive Flash Platform (encryption, per VM visibility and all-flash service level) expand the company’s TAM by enabling it to compete with all-flash arrays on high-end workloads. We suspect the ability to offer an all-flash service level, combined with growing Fibre Channel (FC) mix, will support nearly 50% growth for the next few quarters. We look for additional positive commentary regarding large enterprise and service provider customer growth, average deal size, and fibre channel penetration."

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Shares of Nimble Storage closed at $24.34 yesterday.