Technology

With IT Spending Still Soaring, 4 Stocks to Buy for 2016

Despite the market’s ups and downs, and some high-profile pundits saying that disaster is imminent, the fact of the matter is the economy is improving, as is job growth and spending. While we are poised to finish September with the worst quarter for stocks in five years, it may be offering savvy investors, especially in technology, an outstanding entry point.

In a new research report, Deutsche Bank has interviewed 28 chief information officers, many at top firms in the Fortune 500, who control massive corporate spending. These interviews indicate that information technology (IT) spending has remained solid throughout 2015, with no sign of a slowdown, outside sectors exposed to energy.

We flagged four top stocks that the Deutsche Bank team is positive on, and all four are rated Buy.

Cognizant Technology Solutions

This tech stock is very well liked across Wall Street. Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. (NASDAQ: CTSH) provides IT consulting and business process outsourcing services worldwide. It offers consulting and technology services, such as IT strategy, program management, operations improvement, strategy and business consulting services.

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Cognizant is based in the United States, but it primarily uses an offshore workforce in India. The company is well positioned for a variety of trends in IT services, and many expect it to increase earnings well in excess of the industry average. The company’s solid second-quarter results were broad based. In addition the company raised second-half guidance and is a solid conservative technology holding to add.

The Deutsche Bank price target for the stock is $69. The Thomson/First Call consensus price target is $75.04. The stock closed trading on Monday at $60.04.

Microsoft

This is another top technology stock that should not only do fine in a rising rate environment, but it gives investors some degree of mega-cap tech safety. Microsoft Inc. (NASDAQ: MSFT) stock has gapped up and down this year on earnings, and while the release of the new Windows 10 has put some focus back on the software giant, some bugs in the software have cause update issues, and those reportedly are being dealt with.

The Deutsche Bank team points to the fact that among the large-cap IT players, the feedback on Microsoft was the most positive, and they were surprised at how frequently Azure, which is the company’s cloud computing platform offering, was flagged as a rival to Amazon’s AWS service.

Microsoft investors are paid a very solid 3.3% dividend. The Deutsche Bank price objective is $55, and the consensus price target is $50.17. The stock closed Monday at $43.29.

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Qlik Technologies

This is the top pick at Deutsche Bank, and it beat second-quarter earnings estimates. Qlik Technologies Inc.’s (NASDAQ: QLIK) QlikView Business Discovery platform lets people quickly bring data sources together to create dynamic visual applications that can be navigated and searched intuitively. QlikView uses natural analytics to reflect the way human curiosity searches and processes information, while delivering the enterprise manageability, governance and service offerings organizations require.

Qlik Technologies was named in the spring the top “cross-industry” vendor in the KLAS Report, “Healthcare Analytics: Moving Toward the Continuum of Care,” for having the best understanding of health care analytics and for being considered one of the most important vendors to a customer’s organization in terms of their future business intelligence and analytics plans.

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The company’s new Qlik Sense product, which has helped push the company in the business intelligence and analytic market, is seeing strong demand trends, as the second-quarter licensing total of $76.3 million was much higher than estimates and the strongest since 2011. New customer license and maintenance billings were up 35% in the United States and 28% in the European Union. Best of all, many analysts feel that there is solid upside potential to estimates for the second half of the year.

The Deutsche Bank price target is $50, and the consensus target is $45.56. The stock closed most recently at $36.74.

ServiceNow

This could be among the fastest growing of the Deutsche Bank Buy-rated stocks. ServiceNow Inc. (NYSE: NOW) expects to have 50% of the Global 2000 customers by 2020, adding 15 to 20 each quarter. ServiceNow is the enterprise IT cloud company with the service is used to create a single system of record for IT and automate manual tasks, standardize processes and consolidate legacy systems. Using the company’s extensible platform, customers can create custom applications and evolve the IT service model to service domains inside and outside the enterprise.

Customers use the firm’s service model to define, structure and automate the flow of work, removing dependencies on email and spreadsheets to transform the delivery and management of services for the enterprise. Service Now enables service management for every department in the enterprise, including IT, human resources, facilities, field service and more.

The $90 Deutsche Bank price target is near the consensus target of $89.15. The shares closed Monday at $69.03.

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While the market volatility is scary, it is important to remember that business and corporate IT needs press on despite market ups and downs. Now is the time for aggressive accounts to scale some capital into these top stocks while they are on sale.

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