Pacific Crest: Rackspace Hosting Will Benefit From Secular Shift, Shares Trading At 20% Discount

In a report published Tuesday, Pacific Crest analyst Michael Bowen suggested that Rackspace Hosting, Inc. (NYSE: RAX) will benefit from an imminent industry-wide secular shift from on premise data centers to hybrid clouds made up of private and public clouds.

"As complexities increase in the cloud, enterprise CIOs are more apt to outsource to a managed cloud specialist rather than try to choose the correct cloud technologies and platform infrastructure themselves," the analyst wrote.

Bowen added that Rackspace can partner with software vendors to distribute software and services in a cloud services model. While current partnerships are not yet meaningful to the company's revenue, future agreements could provide years of "solid" revenue growth.

Bottom line, Bowen stated that the secular shift to hybrid cloud IT remains in the early stages and should accelerate over the next few years. As long as the company continues to improve sales execution and support investors should consider Rackspace shares as a "core holding."

Shares are Outperform rated with a $58 price target.