Enterprise software company ServiceNow Inc. continued its run of successive strong quarterly financial performances today with another set of results that blew past expectations.

Earnings before certain costs such as stock compensation came to 67 cents per share, easily surpassing Wall Street’s forecast of 54 cents per share.

The company, which sells information technology service management software that enables employees to access administrative and workflow tools, also reported a net loss of $1.5 million, or a penny a share, for the first quarter. Total revenue came to $788 million, up 34% from a year before.

Once again, ServiceNow’s investors liked what they saw as the company’s stock rose 4.5% in after-hours trading.

ServiceNow’s performance was all the more impressive because the March quarter is normally a weak one for the company. Previously, ServiceNow had warned that increased hiring in the quarter might lower its margins, though clearly the impact was not as great as originally feared.

In addition to its bottom-line figures, ServiceNow said its subscription billings grew by 26% to $810 million, beating estimates of $795 million. Subscription revenue and billings are often said to be important gauge of the company’s overall performance because shareholders view it as a steadier stream of income than the old business model of perpetual licenses.

“The first quarter represented a strong start to the new year, as we continued the momentum from our outstanding 2018 performance,” John Donahoe (pictured), ServiceNow’s chief executive officer, said in a statement “Our performance shows the strength of our product and platform portfolio, and the core strategic partner role we are playing in enabling digital transformation.”

ServiceNow has in recent months expanded from its core business, offering software for customer service management, human resources and security to fuel its growth.

Most recently, in March, the company announced the latest release of its software, called Madrid. The updated platform comes with new features that leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning that are meant to provide additional context for customer service agents. At the time of that release, Venki Subramanian, ServiceNow’s head of product management and customer service management, told SiliconANGLE that one of the aims was to make AI more straightforward for customers to adopt.

“We don’t want an AI initiative inside a company to be a science project,” Subramanian said during an interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio. “When a customer service agent is working on a case, we’re able to identify similar issues that other people might have already reported. The way we are doing that is by embedding AI capabilities directly into the experience.”

The Madrid release also introduced new “no-code” capabilities for building custom applications, in addition to new mobile apps for its users.

Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc., told SiliconANGLE the mobile apps and no-code capabilities give ServiceNow a “mini-platform-as-a-service” offering that can be a key enabler for enterprises that want to further customize their business processes.

“ServiceNow acknowledges it cannot build all of the required best practices in-house, but it can instead empower customers to find the right level of automation they need to power their digital transformations,” Mueller said.

In addition, ServiceNow also announced a partnership with Adobe Systems Inc. last month that will see the companies integrate their systems and data.

Photo: SiliconANGLE