» VIEW ALL POSTS Oct 18 2011   1:36PM GMT

VMware sees growth in management tools, plans updates

Posted by: Beth Pariseau
management tools man, VMware, VMworld Europe 2011

Site Recovery Manager, vCloud Director and vCenter Operations are seeing strong sales, VMware executives said on the company’s earnings call last night.

VMware reported total revenue for the third quarter of $942 million, an increase of 32% from a year ago. CFO Mark Peek and CEO Paul Maritz said management tools were a strong part of those sales, although they didn’t attach any specific numbers to those tools.

“Much of the increased interest for our management tools is being driven by the build-out of private clouds within our customers’ data centers,” said Peek, according to a transcript of the call.

Probably not coincidentally, Maritz let drop that VMware plans to make announcements around its management tools today at VMworld Europe in Copenhagen. When pressed for more detail around the growth in virtualization management tool sales, Maritz also cautioned that it’s the “early days” for VMware in this market and the company’s offerings are still developing:

“Management, as we noted, is a focus of ours, because we think that that’s where a lot of our opportunity lies in the future,” Maritz said. “We’ve been assembling the pieces over the last several years and have now starting to get into the shape that we wanted to be.”

Meanwhile, despite strong growth in revenues for this quarter and a raised forecast for the fourth quarter of 2011, VMware officials predicted stormy waters ahead. The company is now forecasting a decline in its revenues for the first quarter of 2012, compared to the fourth quarter of 2011, because of a slowdown in IT spending and server shipments, Peek said.