Cybersecurity firm Fortinet Inc. beat market expectations with its fourth-quarter earnings today but lowered estimates for the first quarter. Investors didn’t seem to mind.

For the fourth quarter ending Dec. 31, Fortinet reported net income of $182.8 million, or $1.04 a share, compared with a loss of $29 million, or 17 cents a share, in the same quarter in 2017.

Adjusted earnings, before certain costs such as stock compensation, came in at 59 cents a share, up 84 percent from a year ago, while revenue grew 22 percent, to $507 million. According to Investor’s Business Daily, analysts had expected Fortinet to report earnings of 52 cents on sales of $496.4 million for the period.

For the full year, Fortinet said it had bookings of $1.8 billion, up 20 percent from 2017. Billings also rose 20 percent, to $2.15 billion, and deferred revenue rose 26 percent, to $1.69 billion. Cash flow from operations in 2018 came in at $638.9 million, up from $594.4 million in 2017, while free cash flow totaled $585.9 million for the year, compared with $459.1 million in 2017.

Fortinet revised its guidance for the first quarter of 2019, saying it now expects a profit of 37 to 39 cents a share on revenue of $465 million to $475 million. Analysts had expected 41 cents on revenue of $470.1 million.

“Our strong fourth quarter results drove a solid finish to 2018, demonstrating demand for our product and services and illustrating our ability to drive disciplined growth with solid margin improvement,” Ken Xie (pictured), founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Fortinet, said in a statement. “We are well-positioned to achieve another year of better than industry growth in 2019, driven by business momentum and strong customer demand for our broad, integrated, and automated security solutions across their entire network infrastructure.”

Looking to the full year ahead, Fortinet said that it expected to book revenue in the range of $2.06 billion to $2.10 billion.

Despite the first-quarter revision of Fortinet’s, the market reacted positively. Fortinet stock rose about 4.7 percent in after-hours trading. In regular trading, it fell a little under a percentage point, to $81.22, its highest price since Nov. 1.

Although Fortinet competes with the likes of Palo Alto Networks Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and others in firewalls, it has expanded into what it calls a network security operating system for multicloud, web applications, email and the “internet of things.”

Xie spoke early last year with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s video studio, about the company’s opportunities given changing data protection needs:

Photo: SiliconANGLE