Linux poster boy Red Hat Inc. has beaten Wall Street analyst’s expectations once again in its latest fiscal Q3 earnings report, sending its share price rising in after hours trading.

The open-source software giant reported a net income of $47 million for the quarter, or $0.25 per share. Meanwhile, non-GAAP earnings hits $0.48 per share on revenues of $524 million, substantially higher than Wall Street’s expected $0.46 per share on revenues of $521 million.

Red Hat also said its third quarter subscription revenues grew by 16 percent year-on-year to $457 million.

“We delivered another strong quarter as we exceeded our guidance,” said Red Hat CFO Frank Calderoni, in the company’s earnings conference call. “We have now had four consecutive quarters of total revenue growth of 20% or higher on a year-over-year constant currency basis. While we continued to invest in our business, strong revenue growth has driven non-GAAP operating income growth of 18% and operating cash flow growth of 16% year-to-date for fiscal 2016,” he said.

The results mean that Red Hat has now seen double-digit percentage growth in its earnings in eight of the last 12 quarters. Even so, that growth is slowing down a bit from the 29 percent it recorded in the first quarter to just 15 percent in the second quarter and 14 percent now.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst was nonetheless very enthusiastic about his company’s performance, saying that its investments in technologies and partnerships were paying off at a time when increasing numbers of enterprises look to transform their architecture with open-source and cloud-based technologies.

“During the third quarter, we strengthened our leadership position in the open hybrid cloud by introducing new technologies and launching a strategic partnership with Microsoft and its Azure Cloud,” Whitehurst added.

Microsoft Azure has offered Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Web Server, Gluster Storage and OpenShift, its platform-as-a-service, since November 4. Microsoft is also planning to add other Red Hat products to Azure in the coming months, so the open-source vendor can look forward to increasing growth in the months to come.

The “strategic partnership with Microsoft … was really a milestone event for the industry,” Whitehurst continued. “Both Microsoft and Red Hat share the same view that it will be a hybrid cloud world.”

Red Hat’s shares were up more than six percent in extended trading, after rising a fraction in Thursday’s regular session to $78.86. That’s just five percent off the $83 Red Hat’s stock hit on November 5, its highest price point since February 2000 at the height of the dot-com bubble.

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