UPDATE: Evercore Partners Raises Target on Red Hat to $56

Evercore Partners reiterates its Overweight rating on Red Hat

and raises its price target by $4 to $56 on upbeat meeting with the company's management. Evercore Partners says, "We hosted investor meetings on Thursday with Red Hat's CEO, CFO and CTO, and come away continuing to believe that Red Hat is well positioned to benefit from several secular tailwinds such as Big Data and virtualization, and that there is still plenty of head room for RHT to continue to see solid growth in its core Linux business. While RHT shares are off to a strong start YTD (+18%) and may need to consolidate gains before moving higher, we continue to like the LT risk/reward and are raising our price target to $56 (from $52) based on the shares trading to 22x EV/CY13 OCF estimate, which is roughly in line with our LT cash flow growth estimate of 20%." RHT closed at $48.78 a share on Thursday.