Amazon Web Launches High Storage, Apple Falls at RBC: Tech Business Roundup

After the close on December 31st, Procera Networks (AMEX:PKT) will replace Presidential Life Corporation (NASDAQ:PLFE), which is being acquired by Athene Holding, in the S&P SmallCap 600. Shares of Procera are up modestly in Friday trading.

Amazon.com’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) Amazon Web Services said Friday that it has launched High Storage instances, which is a new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance family optimized for applications that require fast access to great amounts of data. These new instances supply customers with 35 EC2 compute units of computing capacity, 117 GiB of RAM, 48 TB of storage across 24 hard disk drives, and can deliver in excess of 2.4 gigabytes per second of sequential I/O performance.

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Analyst Amit Daryanani at RBC Capital reduces his Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) price target from $750 to $725, but keeps his outperform after dropping his revenue and earnings per share estimates for the current fiscal year ending in September due to disappointing sales of the iPhone and also a cannibalization of the regular iPad by the new mini. In addition, Daryanani reduced his first quarter iPhone forecast to from 50 million to 42.1 million with his full-year estimate falling to 161.5 million units from a prior 170.26 million units.

The planned purchase by Arris Group (NASDAQ:ARRS) of Motorola Home division of Google is a transformative acquisition for the buyer, says analyst Richard Valera at Needham and Company, who also believes that the deal will approximately triple Arris’s annual revenue and double its yearly earnings per share while contributing around $2 billion of debt to its balance sheet. Valera commented that, “While we’re concerned about the growth prospects of Motorola’s set top box (STB) business and see risk in the company being able to ramp next-gen home gateway sales quickly enough to offset the likely ongoing decline in STB sales, we believe that given the high degree of overlap in the businesses and Motorola’s relatively poor op margins, there is likely more upside than downside to the company’s synergy assumptions.”

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