Piper Jaffray analyst Andrew Nowinski says his investor briefing with a large security reseller yielded positive feedback on Palo Alto (PANW), Imperva (IMPV) and CyberArk (CYBR). The reseller's customers' top spending priority is now inside threat protection, which bodes well for Imperva and CyberArk, Nowinski tells investors in a research note. Further, their growth with Palo Alto continues to ramp and should exceed 50% in 2016, the analyst adds. Nowinski found comments around FireEye (FEYE) "slightly more cautious" with some viewing the Mandiant service organization as competitive to their professional service offerings.

KeyBanc lowered the firm's price target on Palo Alto Networks to $355 from $380 on lower peer multiples, while keeping an Overweight rating on the shares. The firm says that at some point, the case for optimism needs to be backed up by some optimistic data, and its 1Q24 VAR Survey did not deliver it. IT budgets are still in hiding at this point, with just 50% of KeyBanc's respondents meeting or exceeding their goal in the Q1, the lowest quarterly reading since the heart of the pandemic, and sentiment from the follow-up calls with some individuals also has down ticked. The firm's Q4 2023 VAR survey was iffy, the outlook in 2024 from its CIO survey in January was also not great, its SMB survey was worse than expected, and now 2024 is off to a difficult start - "let's just call a trend a trend," KeyBanc adds.