F5 stock jumps 5% after William Blair upgrades to outperform
Shares of networking company F5 Networks Inc. are up 5% in Friday trading after analysts at William Blair upgraded the stock to outperform from market perform. "Our VAR [value]added reseller] discussions point to a positive inflection in F5's business trends, with a noticeable uptick in needle-moving large deals likely leading to upside in the March quarter (and for the remainder of the fiscal year) relative to low Street expectations," analyst Jason Adler wrote. "While F5 has been slow to adapt its technology to cloud-centric workloads, we were encouraged to hear at the company's recent analyst day that management's top priority is delivering new purpose-built product offerings for the public cloud." Shares are up 16% over the past 12 months, compared with a 14% gain for the S&P 500 .
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