Database company MongoDB Inc.’s stock took a hit today even though the company posted first-quarter earnings that beat expectations and saw strong growth in its subscription and services revenue.

The company, which sells a document-oriented database of the same name that’s used to power big data applications and other intensive workloads, reported a loss before certain costs such as stock compensation of 22 cents per share. Revenue for the period rose 78% from a year ago, to $89.4 million.

Wall Street was expecting the company to report a wider loss of 24 cents per share, on revenue of $83.1 million.

MongoDB also had good news regarding its subscription revenue, which came to $84 million, up 82% from a year ago. Services revenue came to $5.4 million, up 33%.

MongoDB Chief Executive Officer Dev Ittycheria (pictured) said in a statement the company’s “excellent” results were driven by strength “across all products and geographies.”

“Our success is being driven in part by growing customer interest in a modern, general purpose database for use on premise and in hybrid and multicloud environments to help users innovate more quickly and efficiently,” he added.

For all that, MongoDB’s stock still fell by almost 5% in after-hours trading. Investors were most likely upset that the company lowered its full-year earnings guidance, even though its immediate prospects look better.

In a conference call, MongoDB officials said they expect second-quarter losses of 27 to 29 cents per share on revenue of $90 million to $92 million. The earnings forecast was in line with Wall Street’s estimate of a 27-cent loss, and above its $87.7 million revenue projection.

But for the full year, MongoDB said it’s expecting a loss of $1.04 to $1.11 per share on revenue of $375 million to $381 million. Wall Street had forecast a full-year loss of $1.01 per share.

The lower earnings guidance may have something to do with the mounting competition MongoDB faces from rivals such as Amazon Web Services Inc., which announced in January the launch of a rival version of its database, called DocumentDB. MongoDB may also be under pressure after losing one of its marquee customers, Lyft Inc., which said in February it will migrate its workloads to a different database.

In response to these challenges, MongoDB appears to be stepping up its game in mobile. In April, it announced the $39 million acquisition of a company called Realm, which sells a specialized database of the same name that’s used to power mobile applications.

Overall it was still a good quarter for MongoDB, whose database remains a hot commodity for next-generation software applications, said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc.

“MongoDB is also doing well on the product side, what with its Google Cloud partnership and the Realm acquisition,” Mueller added. “Better infrastructure-as-a-service partnerships and mobile can be growth engines for the company. Now, it’s all about the execution, and how long MongoDB’s investors will remain patient while it tries to become profitable.”

Photo: SiliconANGLE