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Shares of cloud identity management provider Okta Inc. soared in after-hours trading as the company vaporized analyst revenue estimates and soundly beat earnings expectations.

Second-quarter revenue jumped 57 percent from a year ago, to $94.6 million. That was more than 10 percent better than analysts’ consensus estimate of $87.4 million.

The quarterly loss of 15 cents beat the consensus estimate of 20 cents. Subscription revenues, which comprise 92 percent of the company’s total sales, soared 59 percent and the number of customers spending more than $100,000 annually with Okta grew 55 percent.

“This need is pervasive and imperative, and I believe we are in the early stages of capitalizing on this high-growth opportunity,” said Chief Executive Todd McKinnon.

The scope of the earnings beat delighted investors, who bid shares up as much as 18 percent in after-hours trading. The stock is up 175 percent this year and 40 percent since the end of July. Update: Shares were rising even higher, by almost 22 percent, in Friday midday trading.

Okta expects its torrid growth to moderate somewhat in the third quarter, but its forecast of total revenues of between $96 million $97 million still represents growth of more than 43 percent.

“We don’t have a specific growth target,” Frederic Kerrest (pictured), Okta’s co-founder and chief operating officer, said in an interview with SiliconANGLE. “We’ve always run the company like adults, building leverage and becoming cash flow positive, which we said we’ll do this year.”

Okta fulfills a need for federated identity management that has been created by the popularity of software-as-a-service, a market that barely existed 15 years ago and is expected to reach nearly $74 billion in revenue this year, according to Gartner Inc. As organizations have warmed to SaaS, their ability to control access and manage identities has eroded because they no longer own the software, networks or underlying infrastructure employees us to do their work.

Okta essentially provides the kind of identity management services organizations used to get from corporate directories but federates access across more than 5,500 cloud services. From its origins as a single sign-on service for the cloud, the company has expanded its product line to include such features as multi-factor authentication, universal directory services and application program interface security and management

Executives pointed to a partnership announced this week with Proofpoint Inc. in which the companies will join forces to combat phishing as an example of how its platform can be applied to scenarios outside of identity management. Earlier this summer, it signaled a deeper push into on-premises applications by acquiring zero-trust security developer ScaleFT Inc., which specializes in server access control.

Security and identity management go hand-in-hand, and Okta sees opportunity in both areas, Kerrest said. He listed the company’s three major areas of focus as security, expanding its partner network and helping its customer establish security and identity management services for their customers that want to do business with them online.

“We help make organizations more secure and reduce cost, but it’s really about enabling their top-line growth,” Kerrest said. “It’s about how JetBlue can give its customers a better experience.”

Acquisitions are likely to be a bigger part of the growth strategy going forward than they have been in the past, Kerrest said. The company raised $300 million in debt equity earlier this year, in part to ensure that promising acquisition opportunities won’t pass by.

Executive stressed that the markets Okta is targeting are so large that one of the difficulties of running the business is deciding where to invest. International sales currently make up only 16 percent of revenue, which makes global expansion an imperative.

Asked what the company’s biggest challenge is, Kerrest identified growth management. “It’s hard when we’re hiring 400 to 500 people this year to bring them into the fold without losing the culture,” he said. “We need to make sure we stay focused on execution.”

Image: Okta