UPDATE: Morgan Stanley Upgrades Oracle

Morgan Stanley upgraded Oracle Corporation ORCL Monday from Equal-Weight to Overweight and raised its price target from $45 to $50.

Analyst Keith Weiss commented that his “Oracle Customer Survey suggests accelerating Cloud Apps growth in CY15. An improved perception of Oracle's positioning for the secular transition to the cloud has the potential to lift the multiple investors are willing to pay for what has proven to be highly durable EPS growth.”

Weiss noted that “Recent proprietary data points give us confidence CY15 performance should lead investors to an improved perception of Oracle's secular positioning, specifically:

1) “in Cloud, our latest Oracle customer survey suggests improving traction with Fusion Cloud Applications;

2) “in Database, our October CIO survey suggests over one third of existing Oracle customers plan to adopt one or both of the new 12c database options in the next year; and

3) “in Engineered Systems, our customer survey indicates a high perception of value in converged hardware/software solution that should sustain good growth.”

The $50 price was based on “14.6x CY16 EPS – reflective of a return to the 5-year average discount we've seen for Oracle vs. the S&P.”

Oracle traded at $40.85 in the premarket, up 2.25 percent.