Apptio representatives rang the opening bell on the Nasdaq Stock Market. (Nasdaq Photo)

Bellevue’s Apptio capped off 2017 by exceeding financial analyst expectations for revenue and earnings per share, as more companies adopt its financial-management software to keep track of spending.

During the fourth quarter, Apptio’s revenue was $52.4 million, an 18 percent jump compared to last year and well above analyst expectations of $49.9 million, according to Yahoo Finance. The company is still losing money as it invests in sales and marketing, but excluding special items, Apptio lost $0.06, an improvement over the $0.10 per share it lost in last year’s fourth quarter and better than analyst estimates of a $0.08 loss per share.

Apptio’s software, delivered as a service because it’s 2018, allows IT organizations to monitor their spending on other cloud services, which is a tricker problem than it might appear. A lot of cloud services allow for spikes in usage in response to certain events, and some services are used by small groups for workers only for a short period of time. Getting a handle on that spending allows companies to set policies around the use of those services.

It’s even more complicated if you’re trying to track spending across hybrid clouds that mix public cloud services and your own premises infrastructure. “Hybrid cloud is the number one driver for TBM,” or technology business management, said Sunny Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Apptio, during a conference call following the results.

For the full year, Apptio’s revenue was $188.5 million, a 17 percent increase compared to the previous year. Apptio also announced that it has become cash-flow positive, an important milestone on the path to true profitability.

Last week Apptio acquired Digital Fuel for $42.5 million, the largest acquisition in the company’s history and the first since it went public in 2016. Gupta said that Digital Fuel will be operated as a separate business unit and should complement Apptio’s products and services, since most of its customers are running their own infrastructure and could be looking for help with cloud migration.

(Editor’s note: This post was updated to correct Apptio’s full-year revenue.)

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