UPDATE: Oppenheimer Upgrades Riverbed on More Favorable Risk/Reward

In a report published Monday, Oppenheimer analyst Ittai Kidron upgraded Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD) from Perform to Outperform, and named a $20.00 price target.

In the report, Oppenheimer noted, “We're upgrading Riverbed to Outperform from Perform and setting a price target of $20. While we recognize NT challenges and admit we might be early, we believe Riverbed's share price presents an attractive risk/return scenario. After fine-tuning our estimates post-2Q13 and digging deeper into Riverbed's product mix, we believe our estimates bake in a fair amount of conservatism. In fact, we believe consensus attributes only ~2.0%-3.0% top-line growth to Riverbed's core WAN Optimization business excluding Granite. Moreover, Riverbed has been investing for growth. In a slower growth environment, Riverbed could further scale back expenses related to OPNET and its own S&M. Overall, we see little downside to shares at the current valuation and recommend investors take advantage of the recent weakness.”

Riverbed closed on Friday at $15.41.