An analyst upgrade was the news pushing Fastly's (FSLY 16.39%) stock more than 16% higher as the last trading month of the year kicked off on Monday. That made the content delivery network (CDN) specialist quite the outperformer on the market, as the S&P 500 index only managed a 0.2% gain on the day.

A likely beneficiary of a rival's stumbles

The person behind the upgrade was Oppenheimer's Tim Horan, who now believes Fastly is an outperform (read: buy) where previously he rated it merely a perform (hold). Horan's price target on the highly specialized tech stock is $12 per share, which is nearly 22% above its current level.

According to reports, Horan's new take is based on recent developments in the CDN segment. In September, a competitor, Edgio, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, among other restructuring measures. The analyst believes both Fastly and peer Akamai will benefit from their rival's troubles; recently, the latter won court approval to purchase about a third of Edgio's client contracts worth roughly $100 million.

He added that Fastly stands to gain around $40 million from the situation.

Not exactly chump change

While it's unseemly to celebrate the pain of a business going through a tough time, the reality is that this is a "better with fewer" situation for both Fastly and Akamai. If Horan's estimates are accurate, that $40 million will be more than a drop in the bucket for Fastly -- the company's trailing-12-month revenue figure is less than $541 million.