Big-data company Hortonworks Inc. today continued a turnaround from a rough patch last year, reporting second-quarter revenues that set a new record and topped analysts’ forecasts.

The Santa Clara, California-based company, whose software helps companies manage and analyze large amounts of data, also said it’s on track to meet a goal of reaching break-even on an operating cash-flow basis by the fourth quarter.

The company is still losing money, reporting a loss before certain costs such as stock compensation of $28.6 million, or 44 cents a share, though that was down considerably from a 72-cent loss in the second quarter of 2016. Revenues jumped 42 percent, to $61.8 million. Analysts were expecting a loss of 49 cents on revenue of $57.4 million.

Not surprisingly, investors liked what they saw, driving shares up more than 4 percent in after-hours trading. Shares had fallen 1.7 percent, to $12.55 a share, in regular trading today. Update: Investors woke up Friday on the phone to their brokers, pushing shares up by 18 percent by day’s end.

Hortonworks Chief Executive Rob Bearden (pictured) said on the earnings conference call that the company’s business was accelerating, as the 42 percent revenue jump from a year ago outpaced the first quarter’s 35 percent rise.

Bearden attributed the growth to several factors, including the overall growth of big data and sales teams executing better on that opportunity. He also said the company is netting larger customers, and existing customers are expanding their use of its software. Hortonworks closed 10 deals worth over $1 million, up from six a year ago.

Moreover, he said, Hortonworks expansion beyond its initial offering of a version of the open-source Hadoop big data software is helping attract the bigger deals. “We’ve expanded the data-under-management lifecycle to be not just Hadoop but the whole data lifecycle,” Bearden said.

Although Hortonworks signed a deal with IBM a month ago to adopt the Hortonworks Data Platform as its official Hadoop distribution, that didn’t figure yet in results. It’s expected to start adding to revenue at year-end and especially in 2018.

Bearden also claimed Hortonworks is gaining on rivals, which include Cloudera Inc., MapR Technologies Inc. and others. “We continue to see a steady migration from other platforms to ours,” he said.

Hortonworks has been cutting expenses fast, logging an increase of only 3 percent in the second quarter. Chief Financial Officer Scott Davidson said that the company used $20 million in cash in the first half of this year, down from $50 million in the same period of 2016.

While lower expenses are generally a positive, George Gilbert, an analyst with Wikibon, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE, said it may indicate a sudden reduction in hiring in marketing and sales that could result in slower growth down the road. Still, investors clearly were surprised by the upside. Or potentially, they’re betting on the possibility that Hortonworks could get acquired by the likes of IBM, Microsoft Corp. or Oracle Corp.

Big-data companies such as Hortonworks have faced increasing challenges from cloud computing providers such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Azure, but Bearden said the cloud is a net benefit. “The cloud is really a great onramp for us,” he said. “We see cloud as adding workloads to our platforms, and then at that point we’re monetizing.”

Hortonworks said it expects $63 million in revenue in the current quarter and $247 million for the full year, the latter up from previous guidance of $235 million to $240 million.

Photo: Robert Hof