UPDATE: Piper Jaffray Cuts PT to $71 on Rackspace Hosting on Lower Cloud Pricing

Piper Jaffray maintained Rackspace Hosting RAX with a Overweight rating and lowered the price target from $80.00 to $71.00. Piper Jaffray commented, "This morning, Rackspace announced that it was lowering the pricing on cloud bandwidth and cloud CDN by 33% and instituting a tiered pricing model for Cloud Files, its object storage service. We believe the price cuts are a reaction to the competitive environment and we expect more price cuts to come in other areas of Rackspace's cloud business in the not too distant future, likely resulting in near-zero cloud revenue growth in the first quarter." Rackspace Hosting closed at $55.33 on Thursday.