VMware confirms Q2 revenue growth and new acquisitions

Cloud giant VMware has reported a 22 per cent year-on-year turnover increase in its second quarter results, and announced plans to acquire network virtualisation specialist Nicira.

The firm's total Q2 revenues were $1.12 billion (724.4 million), and its licensing turnover topped $517 million (333.6 million).

The company also closed four transactions worth $10 million or more (6.5 million), which represents a 100 percent increase on Q2 2011.

Carl Eschenbach, VMware co-president and chief operating officer, said: "The financial and business results for our second quarter 2012 were once again strong despite the tough market conditions.

"Our customers continue to move along the cloud journey by increasingly virtualising their mission-critical applications and building out their private clouds. Global demand for [virtualisation software] vSphere continues to be strong, with a new release expected to be launched in the second half of the year."

Based on these results, VMware expects third quarter revenues to be between $1.1 billion and $1.2 billion (715.8 million - 741.6 million), equivalent to year-on-year growth of between 18 and 20 percent. Total turnover for the year is projected to be around $4.45 billion and $4.635 billion (32.8 billion - 2.989 billion).

Meanwhile, outgoing VMware chief executive Paul Maritz, shed some light on the firm's decision to acquire Nicira. "The whole data centre industry is in the midst of a transition towards an architecture comprised largely of standardised building blocks that run in under the control of layers of software," he said.

"Now similar changes are starting to roll through other data centre functions. By extending the virtualisation approach to these functions, it will be possible to create virtual data centres on-demand, largely in software.

"With the acquisition of Nicira, VMware becomes well positioned to provide virtual network functionality not just in the context of vCloud and vSphere, but to be able to provide it to other heterogeneous non-vSphere based pools of infrastructure as well. So this represents a deepening and broadening of our strategy."

Maritz also drew attention to three other, smaller acquisitions made during the quarter: Desktop virtualisation software developer Wanova, cloud-based analytics company Cetas, and cloud automation provider DynamicOps.