Confluent price target raised to $45 from $35 at Needham

Needham raised the firm’s price target on Confluent to $45 from $35 and keeps a Buy rating on the shares. The analyst cites the firm’s discussions with the company’s customer Glen Gomez – Director of IT Architecture at E*TRADE – which ghlighted reasons for adopting a commercialized Kafka offering, benefits from deploying both Confluent Platform and Confluent Cloud, trends in customer spend, properly implementing a “data gravity” strategy to minimize egress fee, and his thoughts on the Immerok acquisition to commercialize a Flink as-a-Service offering. Mr. Gomez’s Confluent spend is expected to increase to $6M-$8M in 2023, the firm added.