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VMware Caps 2013 with $5.21B

The cloud and virtualization company released its year-end fiscal report, showing 13 percent revenue growth for the year, at $5.21 billion.

• By Michael Domingo
• 01/28/2014

For VMware, 2013 was a very good year.

The cloud and virtualization company released its year-end fiscal report, showing 13 percent revenue growth for the year, at $5.21 billion. In the fourth quarter alone, the company raked in $1.48 billion, or 15 percent over the year-ago quarter. VMware said that growth was upwards of 20 percent over Q4 2012 when excluding revenue from Pivotal (which was spun off last year), as well as other other divestitures.

The split among services versus licensing revenue for the quarter was still tilted toward licensing: services revenue was $796 million, or 13 percent better, while licensing revenue was $687 million, or a 15 percent improvement. In a webcast drilling down into the details of the report, VMware COO Carl Eschenbach cited strong licensing growth in the Americas and Asia Pacific, at better than 20 percent, with China a consistent source of licensing revenue in the last two years. He also said that federal bookings were well over 25 percent.

Eschenbach said that Enterprise License Agreements were one of the keys to growth. "ELAs increase our ability to sell more products and a wider range of products," he said, wherein companies would expand "the content of ELAs to include both NSX and vCloud Hybrid Service in addition to vCloud Suites, Management, Automation, and EUC products." What's important to note is the positive reception of the vCloud suite, considering it has been ready for prime time only since the last quarter of 2013.

But the management and automation tools once again ruled, said Eschenbach, making up 40 percent of the licensing revenue. Here, he said that there's room for growth: "Even with the success of our management and automation products thus far, we believe our customer base is only 10 percent penetrated."

If there was a weak spot, it would be end user computing, where Eschenbach said revenue was in the mid-teens when measured over four quarters.

A press release containing the fiscal summary is here (.PDF). A slide recapping the results and a Webcast of the earnings call are here.