Big data company Hortonworks Inc. has pulled yet another successful quarter out of the bag with earnings that easily surpassed analysts’ estimates, sending its share price soaring in after-hours trading.

Hortonworks, which distributes an enterprise-grade version of the Apache Hadoop software platform as well as other open source software, today reported a second-quarter loss before certain costs such as stock compensation of 12 cents per share on revenue of $86.3 million, up 40 percent from a year ago. Wall Street was expecting a loss of 23 cents per share on revenue of just $80.5 million.

Investors lapped it up, with Hortonworks’ stock price rising more than 14 percent in after-hours trading.

Hortonworks has been on a solid run of late, surpassing consensus earnings per share estimates in three of its last four quarters. The company has also topped consensus revenue four times in the last year.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research said it was encouraging to see Hortonworks edge closer to profitability. “It’s good to see the company making progress on its profitability goals, as this is something that will matter to CxOs using its platform sooner or later,” he said.

Hortonworks said support subscriptions generated the bulk of its revenue at $65 million, while professional services revenue came in at $21 million.

“We attribute our continued growth to the rapid adoption of our open source global data management platforms, which help customers manage the entire lifecycle of their data from point of origin to point of rest and across hybrid and multi cloud architectures, all with common security and data governance,” Hortonworks Chief Executive Rob Bearden (pictured) said in a statement.

That growth could well continue as Hortonworks places its bets on its enterprises growing public cloud adoption, containerization of software assets and artificial intelligence. In June the company announced version 3.0 of its flagship Hortonworks Data Platform offering among other things support for faster deployment of containerized advanced analytics.

“That very much harmonizes with where its partners are going with the containerization of artificial intelligence,” Wikibon analyst James Kobielus said at the time.

The new platform release also enables enterprises to run data-intensive applications more easily across computing environments, whether in the cloud or in on-premises data centers, thanks to expanded partnerships with cloud computing leaders, including Google LLC, Microsoft Corp. and IBM Corp.

Bearden discussed the potential of the company’s latest release during an interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the Dataworks Summit 2018 in June:

Further delighting investors, Hortonworks offered guidance that came in above Wall Street’s own. The company said it’s expecting revenue of $87 million for the third quarter, above the analyst consensus of $82 million.

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