Teradata Inc.‘s stock shot up almost 15% in after-hours trading today after the big-data analytics firm posted fourth-quarter earnings and revenue that topped Wall Street’s expectations, followed by strong guidance for the coming quarter.

The company reported a profit before certain costs such as stock compensation of 38 cents per share on revenue of $491 million. Wall Street had been expecting a profit of just 25 cents per share on revenue of $475 million.

Teradata also reported annualized recurring revenue of $383 million in the quarter, up 9% from a year ago and above its forecast range of $371 million to $373 million.

Teradata Chief Executive Steve McMillan (pictured) said this was the real reason for the strong quarter. He lauded the company’s new “cloud-first focus,” saying it helped grow annualized recurring revenue for its cloud computing business by 165%, to $106 million.

“Our cloud momentum has contributed to another strong quarter of performance, as we exceeded quarterly expectations for recurring revenue, profitability and free cash flow,” McMillan said.

Teradata is often credited with being one of the companies that helped to invent the concept of “big data.” It sells various database and analytics-related software, products, and services. Its flagship product is its Vantage analytics platform for business intelligence. Vantage enables workers to process data using a variety of analytics engines, from Spark to TensorFlow, and using a variety of programming languages.

In recent years, Teradata began a push to move its Vantage platform and other offerings onto major public cloud platforms such as Google Cloud Platform. Vantage is also available on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

“We are accelerating our cloud roadmap and bringing cloud-native integrations at a record pace, and we anticipate driving annual growth of at least 100% in cloud ARR, as well as year-over-year growth in total company revenue, profitability and free cash flow for Teradata in 2021,” McMillan said.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said Teradata was in the process of transforming itself from a license-based business model to one that’s focused cloud subscriptions, and said that its recurring revenue was growing fast as a result of this. However, he noted that Teradata’s services revenue had dropped significantly.

“Thee question is, is this due to the pandemic or due to hesitation of customers to implement new products that requires services?” Mueller said. “Teradata is in a rare situation, with overall revenue  down and costs in services down even more, but still it’s more profitable than a year ago. Investors like it, an augmentation in revenue mix from services to subscriptions and a return to profitability.”

For its fiscal first quarter, Teradata said it’s expecting earnings of between 38 and 40 cents per share. Wall Street had been modeling first-quarter earnings of just 32 cents per share.

Teradata also said it expects public cloud computing revenue to rise by 165% in the first quarter.

For the full year, Teradata said it expects revenue to rise by “a low-single-digit percentage year-over-year,” which suggests it may well end up higher than Wall Street’s forecast of 1.4% revenue growth in 2021.

McMillan appeared on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s livestreaming studio, in December, when he discussed the business advantage of cloud-based data analytics:

Photo: SiliconANGLE