Even before NetApp Inc. released their first-quarter earnings report this week, analysts were anticipating the company would substantially best their earnings from the same period last year. And, in fact, NetApp did just that. The company credits their 28 percent increase in profit on better-than-expected sales of their company-branded products along with the release of the next-gen OnTap OS.

Dan Caplinger, writing for The Motley Fool, posited a seemingly prescient question only the day before the earnings report was released: With such high expectations from investors, can NetApp earnings grow fast enough to satisfy shareholders and keep the stock rising? Caplinger’s concern arose from the increasing number of competitors in the network-storage solution game and whether or not NetApp could successfully navigate the ever-crowding field.

The excitement over NetApp’s increased quarterly profit was addressed by NetApp Chief Financial Officer Nick Noviello. “The cloud and mobility trends are growing. The cloud is a big factor in terms of enabling our customers, as we need to help them manage data across all these environments,” he noted.

Unfortunately, NetApp enjoyed a very short honeymoon when, upon release of next quarter projections, the stock fell 4 percent in after-hours trading. The company’s second quarter earnings forecast, ranging between 60 and 65 cents per share, were too erratic when compared to Wall Street’s expectations.

Even with the slight dip in stock value, NetApp CEO Tom Georgens seemed to be bullish on his company’s future. “Despite an uneven macro environment, our branded business was strong, with 9 percent year-over-year growth,” he commented. “This is evidence of the tremendous value we are delivering to customers today and their confidence in our long-term strategy to enable them to navigate the future.”

Coplinger echoed the same positive potential of the company in his pre-earnings release analysis. He cites NetApp’s huge growth opportunity stemming from strong demand for their data-storage systems thanks to the increasing demand from their customers to be able to collect ever-increasing amounts of data.

Writing for ZDNet, Rachel King summed up the entire situation thusly: The short story is that earnings beat expectations while revenue missed the mark. When you consider the Q2 projections actually fell in range of Wall Street’s expectations, the dip experienced in after-hours trading seems most likely to have just been a hiccup.