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Executives at Pivotal Software Inc. put on a brave face today despite seeing the company’s stock fall in after-hours trading thanks to guidance that came in lower than expectations.

The software development platform maker had just closed out its first full year as a publicly traded company, but it still has a long way to go before it becomes profitable. It reported a net loss of $38.9 million in its fiscal fourth quarter.

Pivotal, still majority-owned by Dell Technologies Inc., also posted a fourth-quarter loss before certain costs such as stock compensation of 7 cents per share on revenue of $169.2 million. The earnings were higher than Wall Street’s projections, with analysts expecting a bigger loss of 9 cents per share. However, Pivotal came up short on revenue, which analysts had predicted to hit $170.1 million.

Pivotal’s full year loss came to $141.9 million, or 64 cents per share, on revenue of $657.5 million.

The real kicker, though, was Pivotal’s guidance for the upcoming quarter and full year. For the first quarter, Pivotal said it’s expecting a loss of between 5 and 6 cents per share, which is inline with Wall Street’s estimates. However, its projected revenue of $183 million to $185 million was lower than expected, as analysts were expecting $191.06 million in sales.

For the full year 2019, Pivotal said its revenues should fall between $798 million and $806 million. Wall Street had pegged its full-year revenue at $813 million.

The lower revenue guidance didn’t do much for investor confidence. Pivotal’s stock fell more than 6 percent in the extended trading session. Update: On Friday, shares dropped nearly 4 percent.

Clearly, Pivotal faces challenges in the year ahead, but Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc., said the company was still in a good position.

“Pivotal has found the winning combo of platform-as-a-service, developer tools and services, and it shows in its results,” Mueller said.

Going forward, Pivotal must figure out how to stay on a growth path in an enterprise landscape where enterprises are increasingly looking toward simpler, lower-level container platforms like Kubernetes, the analyst added.

“So it will come back to Pivotal to revisit, increase and broaden its value proposition for enterprises to create their next-generation applications on CloudFoundry and consume Pivotal services,” Mueller said.

Pivotal does seem to be doing a good job of convincing customers that it’s able to do so. During the quarter, the company saw its subscription base grow 18 percent, to 377 customers in total. Subscription revenue grew by more than 50 percent in the quarter from a year ago.

The company also pushed out some important updates to its main platforms. The last quarter saw the release of Pivotal Application Service 2.4, which introduced a new rolling application deployment feature. The Pivotal Container Service 1.3 release, meanwhile, added support for Microsoft Azure, giving customers a significant new deployment option for apps built on Pivotal.

“We are still in the early stages of this high-growth market,” Pivotal Chief Executive Rob Mee (pictured) said in a statement. “To capitalize on the digital transformation opportunity, we will continue to fuel innovation by investing in R&D, and at the same time, continue our relentless focus on satisfying customers as they move more mission-critical apps to our multicloud platform.”

Photo: Joi Ito/Flickr