Shares in Nutanix Inc. surged in late trading after the cloud-computing company reported earnings and revenue beats in its fiscal third quarter and gave an upbeat outlook.

Nutanix reported adjusted earnings per share of four cents on revenue of $448.6 million, the latter up 11% year-over-year. Analysts had expected earnings of three cents per share on revenue of $433.12 million.

Annual recurring revenue in the quarter rose 32%, to $1.47 billion, and annual contract value rose 17%, to $239.8 million. Net cash provided by operating activities in the quarter was $64.3 million and free cash flow came in at $42.5 million.

Recent company highlights include the launch of Nutanix Central, a cloud-delivered interface that simplifies infrastructure management across various platforms, including public clouds, on-premises data centers and edge environments. Nutanix Central is aimed at providing a consistent management experience with integrated security, access to on-demand resources, governance controls and total license portability, simplifying the process of running applications and storing data across various environments.

Nutanix also announced a new initiative called Project Beacon, focused on decoupling applications and their data from the underlying infrastructure they’re hosted on. Project Beacon enables developers to write applications once and run them anywhere, avoiding vendor lock-in commonly associated with Platform as a Service. The platform provides the service via a single application programming interface and console, ensuring consistent management across environments and providing developers with control over data governance, protection and compliance.

“Our third-quarter results continued to demonstrate a good balance of growth and profitability, resulting in year-to-date ACV Billings growth exceeding 20%, combined with strong year-to-date free cash flow generation,” Chief Financial Officer Rukmini Sivaraman said in the company’s earnings release. “We continue to execute on our growing base of subscription renewals and remain focused on sustainable, profitable growth.”

Looking forward, Nutanix said it expects revenue of $470 million to $480 million in its fiscal fourth quarter. Analysts were expecting an outlook of $452.23 million. For its full fiscal year, the company expects revenue of $1.84 billion to $1.85 billion, higher than an expected $1.8 billion.

The revenue and earnings beats and the upbeat outlook prompted investors to bid up Nutanix shares nearly 15% in late trading.

Photo: Nutanix