Piper Jaffray Reiterates Overweight On Red Hat

Piper Jaffray is reiterating its Overweight rating and $57 price target on shares of Red Hat Inc.

. In a note to clients, Piper Jaffray writes, "We conducted a global survey of 42 Red Hat partners and found that they finished 1.5% above plan for Q1, precisely consistent with their Q4 performance. Partners continue to detect a better pace of business and faster pace of Unix-to-Linux migrations. We observe Red Hat's business benefiting from its positioning at the confluence of several hot segments: open source software, Cloud, and Virtualization. We believe this ensures Red Hat will benefit as companies modernize their data centers and prepare their infrastructure for Cloud Computing, driving ongoing market share gains in 2011. Overweight, $57 target." Shares of RHT gained 75 cents yesterday to close at $41.95, a gain of 1.8%.