Less than a week ago, Pure Storage Inc. saw its shares whacked 13 percent after a research firm downgraded its rating on the stock.

Today, it gained a large portion of that loss back with a second-quarter earnings report that easily beat Wall Street expectations. Shares rose nearly 12 percent in after-hours trading, on top of nearly a 2 percent uptick, to $11.83 a share, today before the results were announced.

The enterprise storage company continued to post a big net loss — $59.6 million, or 31 cents a share, or 16 cents adjusted for stock compensation expenses. That last, however, was way below analysts’ expectations of a 24-cent loss. And the net loss was down from $63.8 million a year ago as the Mountain View, CA-based company cut operating losses by almost 40 percent in the last year.

Revenues for the quarter that ended July 31 shot up 93 percent, to $163.2 million, ahead of its own guidance range of $153 million to $157 million and Wall Street’s $155 million estimate.

Chief Executive Scott Dietzen attributed the upside to several factors, including continued growth of new customers — 350 in the quarter, including British Airways and the University of Tokyo. The company claims some 20 percent of the Fortune 500 are now customers.

Moreover, Pure saw higher demand from cloud customers, which now account for a quarter of its business. International sales now constitute a quarter of total revenues as well.

The company began shipping its second major product line, called FlashBlade, an all-flash memory system designed for cloud-scale use, in the second quarter. “While we aren’t planning on FlashBlade materially impacting revenue this year,” Dietzen said in a statement, “we’re excited about the expanded range of possibilities that FlashBlade is already offering customers in chip design, genomics and life sciences, big data analytics, software development, Internet of Things, machine learning and film production.”

“FlashBlade opens up potential for growth acceleration in FY18, supporting a multiple in-line with other next gen data center peers,” Morgan Stanley analyst Katy L. Huberty wrote in a note to clients. She said it could help open new markets where traditional disk drives are still used.

For the current quarter, the company offered a forecast of revenues between $187 million and $195 million. Analysts peg the number in the middle of that range, at $191 million.

Still, with shares down 24 percent on the year before the report, Pure will have to keep progress going if it wants to reach, let alone exceed, the $17 a share at which it went public last October.

Questions remain about whether pure-play storage companies are viable in the cloud era. What’s more, Dell’s acquisition of storage giant EMC Corp. is about to close, which could make EMC an even bigger force. And upstarts such as Nimble Storage Inc., which reported better-than-expected results on Aug. 23, are nibbling away with all-flash systems.