Team collaboration is one of the hot areas for enterprise software, and investors have gotten used to seeing sales of its providers top their projections.

Atlassian Corp. Plc managed to do just that for its second fiscal quarter ended in December, but it still wasn’t enough. After rising 1.3 percent in regular trading today, shares of the maker of team collaboration and project management software were falling more than 4 percent in after-hours trading. Update: Shares fell about 4.6 percent Friday.

That’s despite Atlassian slightly beating projections on the second-quarter results and a new third-quarter revenue forecast. The company’s earnings before certain costs such as stock compensation jumped 44 percent from a year ago, to 13 cents a share, on a 43 percent rise in revenue, to $212.6 million.

That topped analysts’ expectations of an 12-cent profit on $204.5 million in revenue. On a net basis, the company lost $65.2 million, though that included a $47.3 million noncash charge from writing down its deferred tax assets as a result of the newly passed U.S. tax plan reducing the corporate income tax rate.

The one shortfall came on Atlassian’s forecast of third-quarter profits, with the company predicting an 8-cent adjusted profit to the analysts’ expectation of 11 cents. That’s what may have spooked investors.

Atlassian, which provides about a dozen team-related services such as HipChat, Jira, Confluence and Trello, said its cloud, server and data center products all showed strong results. It also called out its Atlassian Marketplace app store, which it said passed $350 million in cumulative sales since it opened in 2012.

The company has built its business in recent years with a series of acquisitions of collaboration software, most recently buying task management service provider Trello Inc. for $425 million a year ago.

Last September, it launched Stride, a unified team communications service intended to bring together text chat rooms, voice and video meetings and collaboration tools such as screen sharing into one place. In June, it also announced Atlassian Stack, a suite that puts all its core products under a single subscription instead of requiring companies to license each tool separately.

Atlassian issued a new forecast for the third quarter of an adjusted loss of 8 cents, and a net loss of 8 cents, on revenue of $217 million to $219 million. Analysts were figuring a profit of 11 cents on revenue of $215.2 million.

But Chief Financial Officer Murray Demo said on the earnings conference call that the estimate embeds tax rate changes and is more volatile than the full-year estimate. For the year, the company reckoned it will an adjusted profit of 47 to 48 cents or a net loss of 47 to 48 cents on revenue between $853 million and $857 million.

However, William Blair analyst Anil Doradla, quoted by Barron’s, said that although the second-quarter results were impressive, the higher adjusted third-quarter loss might be the result of salary increases and higher payroll taxes.

Photo: Atlassian