Analysts reboot SentinelOne stock price targets after earnings

Tomer Weingarten ain't no ambulance chaser.

The disparaging term describes a lawyer "who seeks accident victims as clients and encourages them to sue for damages," and Weingarten, CEO of SentinelOne ( S ) , says that's not his company's style.

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The chief executive made his comments during the cybersecurity company's earnings call. And he had a lot to say about the sector in general and last month's CrowdStrike ( CRWD ) IT outage in particular, where a botched software update sparked a worldwide tech meltdown.

"We're talking about the largest-ever IT outage, systematically impacting millions of people disrupting thousands of businesses, costing billions of dollars," Weingarten said. "And this was a global practically fleetwide outage, totally unprecedented in reach and scale. ... I've truly never seen anything like this in my lifetime."

"This was an avoidable incident that was born under disregard for software deployment best practices," Weingarten said.

While SentinelOne has "quite a lot of book of business" regardless of the CrowdStrike incident, Weingarten acknowledged that "there have been customers that have been switching away."

"We're not there to ambulance chase," he said. "If somebody shows up at my hospital, I'm darn well going to let them in, but we're doing this at the pace of customers."

SentinelOne CEO cites 'overzealous marketing'

The way Weingarten sees it, substandard platform architectures are extremely risky and can cause single points of failure, "as evidenced by the string of recent breaches at Microsoft in the largest IT outage in history caused by our direct competitor, CrowdStrike."

CrowdStrike is scheduled to report earnings on Aug. 28 and a company spokesperson suggested listening to the company's earnings call regarding Weingarten's comments.

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"The dependency on fragile software can rapidly disrupt our way of life, and cost billions in damages to the businesses they're supposed to protect," he said.

There has been a lot of finger pointing since the outage, with Ed Bastian, the CEO of Delta Air Lines ( DAL ) , which was forced to cancel over 5,500 flights, pinning the blame on CrowdStrike. CRWD in turn said it did not fail to conduct “testing and validation” on its system and claimed that Delta denied assistance to restore its operations.

"Self-proclaimed industry leadership and overzealous marketing create a false perception of reliability; eventually, the end user suffers, which is why we must focus on facts, not fiction," Weingarten said. "Operational hygiene and process controls are essential for any reliable software. Anything short of that is a breach of customer trust."

The Mountain View, Calif., company, founded in 2013, beat Wall Street’s second-quarter-earnings expectations.

SentinelOne reported adjusted earnings of 1 cent compared with an 8-cent loss a year earlier, marking its first quarter of positive adjusted net income and earnings.

"Importantly, we achieved a significant profitability milestone, our first-ever quarter of positive net income and earnings per share," Weingarten said. "Our pace and progress toward profitability remains best in class."

Revenue totaled $199 million, up 33% from a year earlier. Analysts expected the company to break even on revenue of $197.3 million.

Annualized recurring revenue from subscription-based services increased 32% to $806 million, topping estimates of $801.8 million.

SentinelOne shares were down 2.7% at $24.08 at last check. The stock is down 12.3% year-to-date but up 45.3% from a year ago.

Veteran trader: 'Color me impressed'

"Color me impressed," said TheStreet Pro's Stephen Guilfoyle. "There's not a lot that implies that SentinelOne was able to take some business away from CrowdStrike during the problems in July. As I am also long CrowdStrike, that's fine by me."

That said, Guilfoyle added , "sales are growing, margins are growing, guidance was solid, free cash flow is impressive, unadjusted profitability is being approached and the company is not there yet only because of the stock-based compensation."

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"Demand for SentinelOne's services does not appear to be waning as high-end cybersecurity will only become more of a necessity going forward than before," he said. "On that ... from what my feeble brain can comprehend, SentinelOne's technology is toward the top of the industry food chain."

Analysts adjusted their stock-price targets for SentinelOne after the earnings report, and several of them citied the IT shutdown.

Scotiabank analyst Patrick Colville raised the investment firm's price target to $25 from $18 and affirmed a sector perform (effectively neutral) rating on the shares.

While new annual recurring revenue fell year-over-year in second quarter, management believes the CrowdStrike outage is a net positive for the company since more customers and partners are considering the company in more deals and win rates are improving, the analyst said.

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However, CrowdStrike customers have no pressure to act, and the company is barely adjusting its top-line guidance. Overall, Colville said he was waiting for data in its checks on whether the company can more fully capitalize on the CrowdStrike outage.

DA Davidson raised its price target on SentinelOne to $23 from $18.50 and kept a neutral rating on the shares.

SentinelOne delivered a solid second-quarter earnings beat and raised its guidance, operating margins and free cash flow margin improvement continue to impress, and the CrowdStrike outage may modestly boost its new business in the near term, the analyst tells investors in a research note.

DA Davidson adds that it continues to see growth in annual recurring revenue decelerating into the 20s as likely over the near-term. The investment firm said the stock looks fully valued.

BTIG raised the firm's price target on SentinelOne to $30 from $28 and affirmed a buy rating on the shares.

SentinelOne reported a solid earnings beat and raised guidance, its operating profit and free cash flow were substantially better than Wall Street’s forecasts, and management took an aggressive tone on the potential to win incremental share in the endpoint security market after the CrowdStrike outage, BTIG said.

BTIG also noted that management said it had already seen some large customers switch to SentinelOne.

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