Tag Archives: amzn

Gigamon Talks Up Security, Amazon Public Cloud At Analyst Day

Gigamon ( GIMO ) expects its push into security products to gain traction as corporate spending shifts from prevention to detection and containment. Management delivered that message at the company’s analyst day on Tuesday, during which Gigamon also highlighted plans to support public clouds, starting with Amazon Web Services, part of e-commerce giant Amazon.com ( AMZN ). Amazon stock hit an all-time high on Tuesday and has been on a roll since the company posted its Q1 earnings beat on April 28. The IBD Leaderboard stock, however, is extended from both its 603.34 entry and its 638.11 alternative entry, trading Wednesday morning near 708, up a fraction. “In conjunction with its investor day, Gigamon announced field trials for a network visibility product that will work in cloud environments, particularly with Amazon Web Services,” Mark Kelleher, an analyst at D.A. Davidson, said in a research report. “This new product will provide tools vendors with information on data flows, between customer devices within a public cloud, private cloud or hybrid cloud environment. “While initially targeted at the AWS environment, GIMO expects to expand to other public cloud environments, such as Microsoft ( MSFT ) Azure and Alphabet ’s ( GOOGL ) Google. Meaningful revenue from this new offering is not expected until 2017.” Gigamon stock, however, was down 2% in early trading in the stock market today , near 30. Gigamon shares broke out March 11 at a 29.62 buy point, and so they remain within buy range. Gigamon’s roots are in selling communications network hardware appliances that analyze and manage data traffic, but it’s been expanding into security. “Management believes breaches are inevitable, and thus dollars will shift from prevention to detection/prediction/containment — which is where Gigamon plays,” Jason Ader, a William Blair analyst, said in a report. “The network is the most content-rich source of information for all kinds of security tools as the network touches everything, including users, devices, and applications. “But historically, the network was used mainly for connectivity. GigaSecure can look at all traffic and extract the right information and feed it to the right security and analytics tools.” Gigamon stock is up about 13% in 2016 so far. It reported Q1 earnings and revenue that topped estimates, and its shares touched a two-year high at 35 on April 29. Gigamon has an IBD Composite Rating of 95 out of a possible 99, putting it among the top 5% of all stocks in key metrics such as earnings and revenue growth.

Amazon Hits New High As Market Cap Nears $332 Billion

Amazon.com ( AMZN ) stock hit a record high of 704.55 Tuesday, passing its previous high of 696.44 set on Dec. 29 and giving the e-commerce giant a market valuation near $332 billion. The stock ended the regular trading session up 3.4% to 703.07 on the stock market today . Amazon has gained 62% in the past year. The jump comes as Sanford Bernstein analyst Carlos Kirjner raised his price target on Amazon to a whopping 1,000, which is 47% above its close of 679.75 on Monday. IBD’s Take: How healthy is Amazon’s stock and how does it compare to rivals? Find out at IBD Stock Checkup “We think Amazon’s businesses are now so large, fast-growing, and profitable that it is harder and harder for the company to find new areas of investment to keep up with the growth in gross profits,” Kirjner wrote in the report, according to a report from Bloomberg . Among areas of investment and growth is Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing unit that’s on pace to reach $12.5 billion in revenue this year. And thanks to its early entry in the business, AWS is now the leader in cloud computing, with a market share of 31%. The next closest competitor is Microsoft ( MSFT ) with 9%, followed by IBM ( IBM ) and Alphabet ‘s ( GOOGL ) Google Cloud. Among analysts polled by Thomson Reuters, 11 have a strong buy rating on Amazon, 28 say buy and 4 say hold. The move up in Amazon comes as the company on Tuesday announced a new platform on its streaming video service that goes head-to-head with Alphabet-owned YouTube. The new platform, called Amazon Video Direct , lets anyone upload clips or their own licensed videos. Alphabet, which hit an all-time high of 810.35 on Feb. 5, rose 1.4% to 739.38 on Tuesday. Alphabet posted its fifth straight gain, but it is still below its 50-day moving average.

Apple R&D Spending Rises But Still Trails Google, Facebook, Amazon

Spending on research and development is soaring at Apple ( AAPL ), Facebook ( FB ), Amazon.com ( AMZN ) and Alphabet ’s ( GOOGL ) Google as they race against each other in artificial intelligence, virtual reality, cloud computing, electric cars, drones, the Internet of Things and many other technologies. Apple’s R&D spending rose 30% in Q1 to $2.51 billion. In a regulatory filing, Apple said R&D, including stock compensation for engineers and other technical employees, was 5% of sales, up from 3.3% in the year-earlier period. By that yardstick, however, Apple lags Google by far, as well as Facebook. Facebook’s R&D spending has climbed to 13.4% of sales, up from 10% in 2014 and only 7% in 2010. In Q1, Facebook’s R&D spending rose 26% to $1.34 billion, with the company pushing into Internet drones, virtual reality and augmented reality. While virtual reality immerses a user in an imagined or replicated world (like video games), augmented reality overlays digital imagery onto the real world. Amazon and Google, though, are still the biggest spenders, according to a Bloomberg report . In Q1, R&D totaled 16.6% of Google revenue , Bloomberg said, up from 13.8% two years earlier. While Google aims to make gains in artificial intelligence , it’s trailing in software bots , an area where both Microsoft and Facebook made recent announcements. Google’s R&D spending will rise 16% in 2016 to $14.3 billion, BMO Capital Markets estimates. Then there’s Amazon. In Q1, Amazon’s R&D spending was up 28% to $3.53 billion, Bloomberg reported. At that growth rate, Amazon’s R&D spending will likely top Google’s this year.