Argus analyst Joseph Bonner raised his price target on Palo Alto Networks to $275 and kept his Buy rating while also raising his FY19 EPS view to $4.95 from $4.68 and initiating FY20 view of $5.96. The analyst cites the company's latest Q4 earnings beat along with the managements's projections of "strong future growth driven by the development of new enterprise security applications". Bonner is also positive on Palo Alto's recent appointment of Nikesh Arora as CEO, who emphasized the continuity of performance in data security market and a greater focus to grow its cloud security market.

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.