Jefferies analyst John DiFucci lowered his price target on VMware (VMW) to $198, saying that while the company posted a "solid" Q2, its Q3 guidance was affected by the revenue mix shift to "more ratable business". The analyst is keeping his Buy rating on the stock and contends that investors may be over-estimating the decline of its core compute business which has been "more resilient" lately. DiFucci further contends that VMware's deals with public cloud providers "extend the relevance" of its core business. The analyst adds that the company's Pivotal Software (PVTL) acquisition "makes sense" and comes at an "attractive" value, while the deal for Carbon Black (CBLK) comes with some "execution risk" because of the high level of competition in the corporate endpoint security sector.