Continuing to ride the wave or popularity enjoyed by server virtualization technologies, VMware has reported a successful fourth quarter, showing substantial increase in revenue from one year ago.

VMware CEO Paul Maritz said in a conference call that in the near future, the company was planning to focus resources on further growth in the data center automation and middleware management areas through both "organic development" and acquisitions.

"We plan to strengthen and widen our value proposition of what has been called 'the private cloud,'" Maritz said. Besides enabling enterprises to increase the use of shared infrastructure by applications within their own data centers, VMware plans on further enabling them to leverage public cloud resources offered by the company's partners "if and when they are ready to do so."

In the fourth quarter, VMware (80 percent of whose stock is owned by EMC) brought in $608 million in revenue, an 18 percent increase from the same quarter one year ago. The company's GAAP income for the quarter was $56 million, down from $111 million during the last quarter of previous year.

Tod Nielsen, the company's COO since early January, said VMware added 20,000 customers and 3,000 partners in the second half of 2009. About 800,000 copies of VMware's hypervisor vSphere were downloaded since it was first introduced in May 2009.

Most of VMware stock (80 percent) is owned by EMC.

EATON ENDS 2009 WITH LOWER RESULTS THAN YEAR PRIOR
Eaton, the manufacturer of industrial-grade electrical equipment, including power infrastructure products for data centers, reported a year-over-year decrease in total revenue but an increase in net income in the final quarter of 2009.

Summing up the year and comparing it to 2008, when the company showed substantially higher results than it did in 2009, Eaton Chairman and CEO Alexander Cutler attributed lower year-over-year results to the overall economic slump.

"Looking at 2009 as a whole, our earnings were significantly affected by the decline in our revenues due to the market downturn," he said in a statement. "We believe the steps we took to deal with the downturn effectively adjusted our cost structure to ensure we can operate profitably at these lower volumes and realize attractive incremental profits on revenue gains."

Eaton's total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2009 was about $3.1 billion, compared with about $3.5 billion during the same period in 2008. The company's net income during the quarter was $212 million, an increase from $165 million in the fourth quarter of 2008.