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VMware on Tuesday reported a slight drop in third fiscal quarter 2012 income despite enjoying record revenue and non-GAAP income for the quarter.
At the same time, the cloud and virtualization technology leader expects continued growth to come thanks to a couple of key acquisitions that it expects to help it be a leader in the development of software-defined data centers going forward.
VMware also used the release of its third quarter 2012 financial results to unveil the hiring of Jonathan Chadwick as its new CFO. Chadwick, who will officially take the CFO spot on Nov. 5, most recently served as corporate vice president of arch-rival Microsoft and CFO of Skype, which Microsoft acquired.
[Related: Analysis: Nicira Buy To Bring VMware Closer To OpenStack, Networking Vendors]
VMware reported revenue for the third quarter of $1.13 billion, up 20 percent from the $942 million it reported for its third fiscal 2011 quarter.
Nearly half the total revenue, or about $554 million, came in the U.S., which was up about 25 percent over last year.
Revenue from license sales hit $491 million for the quarter, up about 11 percent over last year, while services revenue rose about 29 percent during the same period to $643 million.
Carl Eschenbach, chief operating officer and co-president of VMware, said a big feature of the third quarter was the $1.2 billion VMware invested in acquiring software-defined networking (SDN) startup Nicira and its acquisition of DynamicOps, a developer of management software for provisioning apps and services across heterogeneous cloud infrastructures.
The idea of the software-defined data center has emerged as the clear winner in terms of data center development going forward, Eschenbach said.
"The excitement around Nicira validates our approach to the software-defined data center," he said.
For VMware, that spells growing strength for its vCloud Suite of software for building and managing a complete cloud infrastructure, as well as its Cloud Operations Services for helping customers transform their IT infrastructures into cloud infrastructures, Eschenbach said.
"The response to vCloud Suite and Cloud Ops from both partners and customers has been encouraging," he said.
VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said vCloud Suite is VMware's first implementation of the Nicira SDN technology, giving his company a big opportunity to expand its reach into customers' public, private and hybrid clouds.
"We are the company customers increasingly turn to for help for transforming their IT to the cloud," Gelsinger said.
