Revenue up at VMware as CEO teases future acquisitions

Q3 sees VMware revenue up six per cent to $1.78bn

Revenue at VMware was up six per cent in Q3, with CEO Pat Gelsinger hinting that the vendor is primed for future acquisitions.

For the three months ending 30 September VMware recorded revenue of $1.78bn (£1.45bn), a six per cent increase on the same period last year.

On an earnings call CEO Pat Gelsinger (pictured) hinted that the vendor is on the lookout for acquisitions, following the takeover of software-defined datacentre security firm Arkin earlier this year.

"We have performed well on our acquisitions," he said.

"They play key roles in our current product portfolio and we believe that there are good opportunities for us to make acquisitions and as we describe, we really have two primary uses of our cash buybacks, for shareholder return and for acquisitions.

"We do see a range of opportunities across management, network, security and mobility as potential targets and those are the areas that we have explored in the past and we do see those as good ones to augment and accelerate our strategy looking forward."

Gelsinger also shed light on VMware's recently announced partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) which will see VMware's private cloud offering available on AWS' public cloud.

The AWS partnership comes after VMware announced a cloud collaboration with IBM at the beginning of the year.

"Generally we expect, as we bring it into the marketplace in the middle of next year, that we'll be more enterprise oriented initially, as we focus on some of our largest and most strategic customers," he said.

"We will make it broadly available through our channel programme as well as Amazon's channel programme for their marketplace offerings. We will engage with mutual partners for it as well, including some of our largest system integrator partners - they've shown quite a lot of interest in that capability over time."

VMware also announced the formation of a new internal products and cloud services division to be headed up by Raghu Raghuram and Rajiv Ramaswami. Sanjay Poonen has also left his role as general manager of end-user computing to become chief operating officer of customer operations.