Oracle Corporation Analyst Roundup

Oracle Corporation ORCL hosted an analyst meeting Thursday. The stock closed Friday at $38.89, up 1.62 percent.

Here are highlights from some of the analysts who attended the meeting.

Cantor Fitzgerald - Buy, $48 Price Target

"Oracle's transition into the cloud has been a long, arduous journey given the size of the company and the breadth of its portfolio. That said, our interaction with customers this week at Oracle OpenWorld, attendance at dozens of breakout sessions, and yesterday's analyst meeting provides us with further confidence that Oracle has an opportunity to be a major beneficiary from the trend toward cloud computing, successfully making it ‘across the chasm.’"

MKM Partners - Neutral, $44 Price Target

Oracle "spent a lot of time at yesterday's analyst meeting outlining the strength of its cloud software business, asserting that it is accretive to revenues and at least neutral to margins, while on-premise continues to grow as well. However, this isn't evident in software sales that have been weak the past few quarters or in any kind of acceleration in deferred software revenue growth."

Nomura - Buy, $46 Price Target

"Oracle had a breadth of product announcements for the cloud (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS), in-memory database and analytics. Directionally, this should lead to greater traction in the cloud, but this may be visible first as improving user metrics and later as evidence of greater traction in the quarterly financials. Investors may be losing confidence in the pivot to the cloud. We think it will be more a function of time to move the tanker after a late start to the cloud, in-memory and big data."

Summit Research Partners - Hold, $35 Price Target

"We continue to be on the sidelines due to the mismatch between valuation and growth rates. While cloud presentations were impressive as usual, we question whether the impact on total growth rates is material despite most investors seemingly equating the valuation multiple to SaaS progress. For us, the long term issue of hybrid integration remains a question because customers need to directly migrate to the cloud with ease, otherwise SaaS apps can create an opening that allows competitors into its installed customer base."