Managed database service company MongoDB Inc. handily beat estimates in its third-quarter financial results today, raising its end-of-year outlook in the process.

The company reported a loss before certain costs such as stock compensation of 31 cents per share on revenue of $150.8 million, up 38% from the same period one year ago. That was better than expected, as Wall Street was looking for a bigger loss of 44 cents per share on revenue of $138.7 million.

MongoDB Chief Executive Dev Ittycheria (pictured) said the revenue growth came in well ahead of the company’s own expectations thanks to the strength of its product platform and its go-to-market execution. “COVID-19 has further elevated the importance enterprises are placing on moving quickly to the cloud,” Ittycheria said.

MongoDB also reported subscription revenue of $144.1 million, up 39% from the same time a year ago. Services revenue came to $6.7 million, up 19%.

The company sells an open-source document-orientated database that’s used by enterprises to power big-data applications and other intensive workloads. The database is a favorite of developers thanks to its relative ease of use and the fact that it can store many different types of information.

MongoDB also sells a cloud-hosted version of its database, called MongoDB Atlas. During the quarter this version was updated with a new clustering feature that makes it possible to distribute a single database environment across multiple public clouds.

“With the recent announcement of multi-cloud clusters, MongoDB Atlas is the first cloud database to enable an application to run simultaneously across multiple cloud providers,” Ittycheria said.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that this is a capability that enterprises desperately want and need.

“They want the freedom to deploy critical data and applications wherever they need to run them, without any expensive coding or testing cycles, so this should work out very well for MongoDB,” Mueller said.

Today’s earnings beat comes after a similarly strong performance three months prior.

For the next quarter, MongoDB said, it’s optimistic that it will see further growth, issuing a forecast that puts its loss per share in the range of 39 to 42 cents per share on revenue of $155 million to $157 million. Wall Street had earlier forecast a fourth-quarter loss of 43 cents per share on revenue of $146.1 million.

With that in mind, MongoDB told investors it’s also raising its full-year guidance. For its full fiscal year 2020 it expects revenue of between $574.4 million and $576.4 million, well ahead of its previous range of $549 million to $554 million.

Mueller said his analysis of the numbers show that MongoDB seems to be set up nicely for the future.

“It was another good quarter for MongoDB,” Mueller said. “It looks like the company is managing its losses to a percentage of its revenue, and it’s also spending more on R&D. This strategy should pay off as the heavy lifting in its product has already been done, so now it’s all about gaining market share. In the long run we can expect it to either generate more growth or slow down on the cost side.”

MongoDB’s stock fell 2% in after-hours trading.

Image: SiliconANGLE