Creativity software firm Adobe Inc. saw its shares rise more than 4% in after-hours trading today after posting second-quarter financial results that beat expectations.

The company, which sells the popular Photoshop image editing tool as well as a range of cloud marketing technology services, reported earnings before certain costs such as stock compensation of $1.83 per share on record quarterly revenue of $2.74 billion, up 25% from a year ago. Wall Street had forecast earnings of just $1.78 per share on revenue of $2.7 billion.

Adobe pointed to its rising subscription revenue, which topped $2.46 billion in the quarter. Product revenue came to $152.8 million, and support revenue reached $135 million.

Breaking down the numbers by unit, Adobe’s largest Digital Media business pulled in $1.89 billion in revenue, with $1.59 billion of that coming from its Creative Cloud segment, and $296 million from Document Cloud. The Digital Experience unit made $784 million.

Adobe also said its Digital Media unit’s annualized recurring revenue grew to $7.47 billion, up $406 million from the previous quarter.

Interestingly, despite the high growth rates, Adobe’s guidance for the third quarter was lighter than expected. The company said it’s expecting earnings of $1.95 per share on revenue of $2.8 billion. Wall Street had forecast earnings of $2.05 per share on revenue of $2.83 billion.

Besides the numbers, Adobe officials had quite a few details on the company’s progress that they wanted to share. In a conference call with analysts, Adobe Chief Executive Officer Shantanu Narayen (pictured) noted that the firm had picked up some significant new business from Amazon Web Services Inc., for example.

Last year’s acquisitions of Marketo Inc. and Magento Inc. were another topic of discussion. Narayen stressed how these buys were helping the firm attract new customers and expand its addressable markets with new products such as the new Commerce Cloud, which is built on Magento’s technology.

Analyst Ray Wang of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that both Marketo and Magento were accretive, providing Adobe with “a good cross-sell” into existing accounts.

“They may have also gotten more enterprise talent and tools to reach out to CIO buyers,” Wang said. “Despite the soft guidance, the overall customer experience market is going to be worth $16.7 billion by 2025, and Adobe is one of the top three leaders in the segment.”

“Adobe continues to deliver solid performance in its traditional businesses while the experience cloud division is growing healthily,” added Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT Inc. “Overall, the diversification strategy devised by Shantanu Narayen and his team appears to be perking along. Despite the soft guidance investors appear ready and willing to cut the company a break.”

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