Nutanix’s fourth-quarter fiscal 2019 earnings handily beat expectations, sending its stock up more than 19% in after-hours trading on Wednesday.

The company again reported losses in revenue and billings as it transitions from a hardware to a software- and subscription-focused business. It reported a net loss of $194.3 million, or $1.04 per share, on revenue of $299.9 million, down from $303.7 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2018.

This puts its net loss for the quarter at 57 cents per share on an adjusted basis, which is still better than analysts’ forecasts, which projected a loss of 64 cents per share.

“What I’m most proud of is that we beat expectations in billing, revenues, and gross margins in Q4, and even though our business is impacted by ongoing subscription transition, we are guiding above street estimates for software and support, billings and revenue,” said Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey in an interview with SDxCentral after the company’s earnings call. “It’s been a painful transition because all transitions by definition are painful. But we demonstrated measurable progress in subscriptions, and I feel good about this. We’re looking forward to a world where our licenses very soon can be ported back and forth between on-prem and off-prem.”

Nutanix ended the fiscal fourth quarter with 14,180 end-customers, adding 990 new customers in the quarter including 31 from the Global 2000. On the earnings call, Pandey said this brings Nutanix’s total Global 2000 customers to 810.

Fourth quarter customer wins included Boardriders, Daiwa Institute of Research, Freeport-McMoRan, ICICI Bank, ING Bank Australia Limited, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and Noble Energy.

Nutanix also signed 58 deals during the quarter worth more than $1 million, and now has 16 customers that have spent more than $20 million in lifetime bookings, up from nine customers at the end of fiscal year 2018, Pandey said.

He pointed to one, specifically: a Fortune 25 customer that signed a Q4 deal worth more than $15 million. This customer has a lifetime spend of about $30 million since its first purchase 18 months ago.

“We don’t sell vaporware,” Pandey said, in a very thinly veiled dig at Nutanix’s top competitor VMware, adding that the Fortune 25 customer “selected our platform as the backbone powering its infrastructure across the U.S.” This included Nutanix’s “core platform with AHV virtualization over an incumbent that had overpromised and underdelivered on true enterprise reliability with software defined infrastructure.”

During an interview after the earnings call, Pandey wouldn’t name the Fortune 25 customer or the competitor that Nutanix beat to win the contract. “When they go low, I go high,” he said. “It’s definitely left to your imagination. It is a software-defined infrastructure player.”

The customer chose Nutanix because of its “enterprise-grade reliability and availability and security — all of these things are where we make money because we do it right.” He added that this customer also “wants to bring Amazon inside [the data center] and they want to take their apps outside to the public cloud, so this back and forth, we become very relevant to them.”

This may include Amazon Outposts in the future (the cloud giant has said its on-premises hardware will be available later this year). But right now it includes “using commodity hardware with Nutanix software running on it,” Pandey said. “And we will port to Outposts as and when a customer wants to.”

When asked specifically about partnering with Amazon on Outposts, Pandey said “these are early days, but we are engaged and working with AWS in both taking our software to their bare metal and vice versa, supporting their bare metal on prem with Nutanix software.”

And while containers stole the show at VMworld this week with VMware announcing it would natively integrate Kubernetes into its core compute platform, Pandey said Nutanix is already there. “We are Linux based, and the Docker engine is going to be more and more powerful within Linux,” he said. “That gives us a core competitive advantage because many cloud players like Amazon and Google and even increasingly Azure as well are using Linux, and we don’t need to retrofit a container engine on a hypervisor technology.”

Nutanix’s core platform comes natively integrated with Kubernetes, and the company is working to integrate it with Calm, which provides application automation and lifecycle management across public clouds and Nutanix-powered private clouds, and its Prism control plane.

“Where we’ve started to differentiate is blurring the lines between VMs and containers,” Pandey said.