Target’s (TGT) decision today to build out its e-commerce infrastructure won’t likely hurt Amazon.com (AMZN), writes J.P. Morgan (JPM) analyst Imran Khan in a note to clients. In fact, it could help.

Target announced today it would construct its own order-fulfillment services for its online sales, which totaled $1.8 billion last year, according to Khan’s estimate, signalling the end of its use of Amazon’s back-office fulfillment services, for which Amazon receives a fee.

“To deliver a customized multi-channel experience for Target’s guests, we believe it is in Target’s best interest going forward to assume full control over the design and management of Target’s e-commerce technology platform, fulfillment and guest services operations,” said Target president Steve Eastman in a prepared statement.

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Wow, an actual, honest-to-goodness, venture-backed software IPO.

We’re getting one today.

SolarWinds Inc. (SWI), an Austin-based provider of network management software, on Tuesday priced an IPO of 12,116,279 shares at $12.50 apiece. The company is selling 9 million shares in the offer, with selling holders–including various officers of the company and several venture investors–offering the rest. The selling holders will sell up to an additional 1,817,441 shares to cover over-allotments.

The banks on the deal include J.P. Morgan (JPM), Goldman Sachs (GS) and Morgan Stanley (MS), with Jefferies & Co. (JEF), Thomas Weisel (TWPG) and Ladenburg Thalmann as co-managers.

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For many quarters now, telco giants Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T) have suffered sharp declines in the residential wireline business, but have been bailed out the by rapid growth of their wireless businesses. But J.P. Morgan analyst Mike McCormack this morning warns that fundamentals in wireless are now deteriorating. As a result, he downgraded both stocks today to Neutral from Overweight. McCormack cut his target to $28 from $30 for AT&T; for Verizon he goes to $32, from $36.

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Seems the more the Street thinks about Cisco Systems’s (CSCO) announcement Monday that it will sell servers, the less the Street is inclined to be enthusiastic. As I noted Monday, Cisco is expected to lose current revenue from partners Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and IBM (IBM) as it comes into deep competition with both. And the effort Cisco will need to make to actually be successful in selling a server against both vendors seems somewhat formidable–however enthusiastic Cisco is about its server, dubbed the “Universal Computing System,” or UCS.

JP Morgan’s Ehud Gelblum sounds the most skeptical of the lot. His colleague Mark Moskowitz, who covers HP and IBM, today put out a note saying that it’s going to be pretty tough for Cisco to put together the necessary software and services to match the top vendors of servers. Gelblum agrees, but he’s more interested in what seems to be a rather skimpy return even if Cisco does succeed.

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Carl Johnson, an underappreciated observer of the tech investing world and a long time analyst on the semiconductor equipment business, who can be found online at Infrastructure Wednesday afternoon, sent along an annotated version of a list of the Top 10 Tech Investing Rules, as set down in Institutional Investor magazine by J.P. Morgan chip analyst Christopher Danely.

Carl did two things to make Danely’s valuable list even better. One, he provided his own commentary on Danely’s thoughts. And two, he decided that what investors really need is a Baskin-Robbins length list of 31 rules. In Part 1 of this post, I offer up Danely’s list along with Carl’s commentary. And in Part 2, I tack on Carl’s additional rules. The result is a lot to read, but some extremely useful insights.

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J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz this morning cut his rating on Dell (DELL) to Underweight from Neutral, chopping his price target to $8.50 from $12. The move is connected to his new, grimmer outlook for 2009 PC sales: He now expects world-wide shipments to drop 13.5 percent this year, down from his previous forecast for a decline of 3.7 percent.

“Dell’s high PC exposure, particularly in the enterprise, could force the company to seek revenue offsets where incremental costs and competition could detail a return to margin stability or result in cash burn,” he writes.

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J.P. Morgan’s Imran Khan theorized in a research note this afternoon that Amazon.com (AMZN) could eventually be a beneficiary of the demise of Circuit City (CC), which earlier today said it would close all of its remaining stores and liquidate.

In the short run, it’s not likely to help, as the inventory from the company’s 567 remaining stores is sold off in a giant going-out-of-business sale that could pressure pricing in the already soft consumer electronics sector. But Khan also estimates that the company did $1.2 billion to $1.4 billion in online sales in its most recent fiscal year; he notes that, according to ComScore (SCOR), CircuitCity.com was the 11th largest Internet retailer by unique users through November. The company will stop operating the site as of Jan. 18, it said today. Khan thinks Amazon could inherit as much as half of Circuit City’s online business.

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Earnings estimates for Baidu (BIDU) continue to head lower in the wake of the recent controversy over search-related advertising on the site by unlicensed medical companies. A pair of analysts who are otherwise bullish on the stock today chopped their forecasts for the China-based Internet company.

Dick Wei, a Hong Kong based analyst at J.P. Morgan, today cut his earnings forecasts for the company by five percent for this year and 19 percent for 2009, citing weaker revenue from the medical and pharmaceutical sector given actions the company has taken to block some advertisers in the wake of the recent controversy, as well as macro headwinds that he thinks could impact online ad spending by small- and medium-sized businesses.

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Clearwire shares are down sharply following negative comments on the company this morning from analysts at J.P. Morgan and Stanford Group.

The company’s shares gained ground yesterday following the completion of its deal to acquire Sprint’s (S) Xohm wireless broadband business; it also closed a $3.2 billion investment from Google (GOOG), Comcast (CMCSA), Time Warner Cable (TWX), Intel (INTC) and others. But there are concerns that the company still faces daunting challenges, including a highly competitive market and a need for substantially more capital.

J.P. Morgan’s Mike McCormack resumed coverage with a Neutral rating, from Overweight previously. That’s an eye-opening change, given that Morgan was one of Clearwire’s advisers on the Sprint deal. He has a $6 price target on the stock.

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Time to draw a line in the sand?

J.P. Morgan software analyst John DiFucci this morning did what every good software analyst has been doing in the last few days and chopped his estimates for most of the companies in his coverage universe. The reductions reflect both the impact of the rising dollar, which tends to hurt results for the companies in the sector, and the softening macro backdrop. But DiFucci also did something else: He asserted that the time has come to buy the stocks, noting that “everything’s cheap.” He says most of the stocks he follows are trading below the net present value of their recurring cash flow from maintenance contracts.

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Here’s a cheery item on the chip sector that I missed while I was off at this morning’s Apple (AAPL)-sponsored Jack Johnson concert in San Francisco. Christopher Danely, semiconductor analyst at J.P. Morgan, asserted in a research note this morning that “deteriorating demand will bring about a correction in semiconductor estimates and stocks over the next four to six weeks.”

Wrote Danely: “We expect almost every semiconductor company we cover to lower estimates as a result of the correction.”

Danely does say that a fourth-quarter rally in the group is likely after the bad news comes out during October earnings season; he points out that the SOXX and the Nasdaq have gained ground in the fourth quarter in five of the last six years.

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Microchip (MCHP) shares are headed lower in early trading after J.P. Morgan semiconductor analyst Christopher Danely cut his rating on the stock to Neutral from Overweight.

In a research note, Danely says that the move reflects “a slowdown in the Chinese consumer end market and the stock’s high valuation.” Danely said that during a trip to Asia this week, almost every company he met with said they are seeing slowing Chinese consumer end market demand due to the earthquake in Szechwan province. He writes that most companies are hopeful that end demand will stabilize and improve just before the Olympics in late July and early August.

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While not strictly a technology story, JP Morgan’s buyout of Bear Stearns on Sunday is worth looking at in the larger context of the tech industry. As you hopefully know by now, JP Morgan picked up Bear Stearns for $2 a share, a total of $236 million, which is (quite literally) pennies on the dollar for a firm that not so long ago was valued at $170 a share and on Friday alone had tumbled from about $55 a share to $30 a share.

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