Snowflake’s first quarter as a public company got off on uneven footing with the data warehousing vendor posting strong revenue growth and a hefty financial loss for the quarter. But that awkwardness was expected as investors piled heavily onto the vendor.

Snowflake, which went public with a multi-billion-dollar initial public offering in mid-September, posted a more than doubling of year-over-year revenues to $159.6 million for its fiscal third quarter of 2021. However, costs also nearly doubled, which resulted in net losses surging from $88.1 million last year to $169 million in its latest quarter.

Snowflake CFO Michael Scarpelli told investors that while the vendor has seen a downturn in data usage from its travel-based customers, “business is booming” for those in the online shopping space “and their consumption is much higher than we’re forecasting.”

Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman also noted that the vendor’s work with Salesforce.com has generated “a ton of activity,” explaining that “the Salesforce data is incredibly prominent in the Snowflake world because that data typically gets overlaid with all kinds of different types of marketing data.” Salesforce.com is also an investor in Snowflake.

Scarpelli added that Snowflake expects to push its gross margins from 70% it posted in Q3 to the mid-70% range longer term. He explained part of this is due to newly renegotiated storage deals with AWS and Microsoft, where “virtually all of our businesses run in … today,” and that he expects to be able to renegotiate these deals again. Scarpelli also cited Snowflakes ongoing scale push across international markets and increased pricing opportunities.

Investors took this message to the street as Snowflake’s stock surged 17% on the earnings news and has tacked on nearly the same daily gain today. The company’s stock has increased 60% since its IPO.

Snowflake provides data warehouse services using a cloud-based architecture offered through an as-a-service model. This allows enterprise customers to analyze data stored in a central repository using business intelligence tools or other analytics applications. Its platform supports the three largest public clouds — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — however, it also competes against these platforms.

Slootman said that competitive balance continues as it’s only dealing with on-premises competitors when enterprises are looking to migrate toward a cloud-based option.

Snowflake most recently updated its cloud data platform with its new Snowpark engineering tool, an expansion of its Snowflake Data Marketplace, new data governance technology, and support for unstructured data.

Gartner, in its latest ranking of cloud databased management systems, placed Snowflake in its “challenger” quadrant alongside Redis Labs. Market “leaders” in the space include the biggest hyperscalers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google, Oracle, SAP, IBM, and Alibaba Cloud.

Snowflake was applauded in the ranking for its cloud-native and multi-cloud platform that supports independent scaling of resources and dynamic elasticity, and an overall ease of use. However, it was dinged for a pricing structure that was not geared toward more stable data storage needs, a lack of pre-built database analytics, and a more difficult path toward integration into a surrounding ecosystem.