Shares of the DevOps company JFrog Ltd. ticked upward in after-hours trading today after it posted mixed results for its fiscal first quarter.

The company reported break-even earnings before certain costs such as stock compensation, with revenue coming to $63.7 million, up 41% from the same period a year ago. That resulted in a net loss of $19.7 million for the quarter.

Wall Street had been looking for break-even earnings on lower sales of $61.15 million. Investors were apparently pleased with the results, with JFrog’s stock gaining almost 4% in extended trading, having lost almost 9% earlier in the day, another awful day for tech and other stocks.

JFrog is a provider of software developer tools, best known for its open-source binary repository manager Artifactory. The offering is somewhat similar to GitHub, which is used by developers to store their code. But it caters to a different part of the development lifecycle, storing the binary files that are created when engineers compile code into a functioning program.

The JFrog Platform also includes JFrog Pipelines, a continuous integration and continuous delivery platform that’s used to create automated software workflows that transform raw code into binaries before deploying them automatically.

JFrog co-founder and Chief Executive Shlomi Ben Haim (pictured) said the company had demonstrated a solid start to fiscal 2022 with a growing number of customers transitioning to the cloud, powering their DevOps and securing their software supply chains with the company’s platform. DevOps refers to the modern method of creating applications faster using teams of developers and information technology staff.

“Our consistent investment in an end-to-end DevOps platform, that includes advanced security and distribution capabilities, answers the market demand,” he said. “Our focus on multicloud, hybrid and self-hosted offerings continues to bear fruit.”

JFrog had some positive numbers to share, noting that its cloud revenue jumped by 63% from the same period a year earlier. It said cloud revenue now accounts for 26% of the company’s total sales, up from 23% a year ago.

The company also had good news on the customer acquisition front. It said the number of customers that generate at least $100,000 a year in annual recurring revenue rose by 52%, to 599, compared with just 395 last year. Meanwhile, its customers delivering at least $1 million a year in ARR rose from 10 to 16 over the same period.

It seems that customers, once they start using one or another of JFrog’s tools, quickly start to use the rest of them. The company said that customers that use the complete JFrog platform now represent 35% of its total revenue, up from 29% last year.

Such strong customer growth may well explain JFrog’s fairly optimistic guidance for the second quarter. The company revealed it’s looking for a loss of three to four cents per share on between $65 million and $66 million in sales. That compares with Wall Street’s forecast of a penny per share loss on sales of $64.93 million.

Photo: SiliconANGLE