(By Balachander) FBN Securities initiated coverage of shares of Informatica Corp. (NASDAQ:INFA) with an "Outperform" rating and price target of $45.
"We are positive on Informatica in spite of last quarter's miss as the company is very well positioned in data integration/ETL, it will ship Informatica 9.5 for Hadoop later this year, and we think that it is solving its sales force execution issues which plagued the company last quarter," the brokerage wrote in a note.
Informatica provides enterprise data integration and data quality software and services.
The company's ETL/data integration products are integral to the Big Data trend, and it has best-of-breed products in this segment, the brokerage noted.
FBN said INFA is ranked highest in data integration tools and it has best-of-breed ETL solutions and has strong and growing businesses in data quality and MDM.
"Unfortunately, the company is now experiencing weaker trends in Europe than many other technology companies, and it has not executed well in the US (leading to the departure of the company's prior head of sales; new head of sales John McGee joined in late July)," BMC wrote in a note.
However, this has led to a valuation more in line with its peers (versus the traditional premium), BMC said. "Plus, we believe that the company is addressing its sales execution issues and believe that they should mostly be resolved by the end of this year."
The stock, which has been trading in the 52-week range of $27.23 to $54.49, advanced 2.02 percent to trade at $34.87 on Thursday.