NICE-Systems Ltd. (NICE)

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Nice Systems, Amdocs on CIBC's global 47 stock picks
25.9.06 | 17:30 By Shirley Yom-Tov
Nice Systems (Nasdaq, TASE: NICE) and Amdocs (NYSE:DOX) appear in CIBC's global list of 47 recommended companies, published on Thursday.

CIBC has been publishing its Special Research Series since 1975, covering investment ideas in a range of categories. This year, Nice and Amdocs appear under hi-tech alongside the likes of Oracle, Cisco Systems, Motorola, and Texas Instruments.

Nice is covered from New York by analyst Shaul Eyal. His rating for the company is Outperform with a 12-month price target of $34, which is 25% above its present level on Nasdaq. The company's business gained momentum in the second half of the year, Eyal writes, with strong sales of enterprise recording systems for call centers. In the second quarter sales of these systems rose 33% against the same period of 2005 to $73 million. EDS recently chose NicePerform as its standard system for all its service centers around the world.

Nice recently signed 11 new deals, including a CRM agreement with Rogers of Canada.

Amdocs is also covered by Eyal, who set it a price target of $42, which is 7% above its present trading level on the NYSE. Shares in Amdocs, which sells software for customer relations management and billing to phone companies, have risen 45% this year.

Eyal believes that the company's forecast for the year 2007, revenues of $2.88 billion, is highly bullish. Its backlog of orders at the end of the fiscal third quarter stood at $1.96 billion, an increase of $120 million from the end of the prior quarter. Of that amount, $80 million derived from organic operations and the $40 million is anticipated to arrive from Cramer Systems, which Amdocs bought for $475 million in mid-August.

CIBC's SRS list includes stocks that analysts think stand out, primarily because they are underpriced versus their growth potential.

In finances, the list includes the Nasdaq exchange, Goldman Sachs, and the Bank of America.

Industry includes General Electric, Honeywell and United Technologies. Healthcare has Barr Pharmaceuticals, which is a great rival of Teva. That Israeli company isn't on the list.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/766812.html