Verizon Communications reported year-over-year growth in both revenue and earnings per share for the first quarter of 2012.

The company reported EPS of US$0.59 on $28.2bn in operating revenues for the first quarter of 2012. The figures represent a 15.7% EPS increase and a 4.6% revenue increase year over year.

Verizon chairman and CEO Lowell McAdam, while acknowledging strong growth and cash flow during the quarter, said the company had high hopes for its enterprise business, which includes data center services.

“Our repositioning of Verizon Enterprise Solutions has better aligned our strengths in high-growth markets, and we expect our enterprise business to contribute even more to overall Wireline revenue growth and profitability over time,” McAdam said.

Total global enterprise revenue was $3.9bn, Verizon said – a 0.9% increase compared to the first quarter of 2011. Within this revenue, sales of strategic services – which include services by the hosting and cloud subsidiary Terremark – have gone up 11.6%.

This business unit was recently chosen to be part of a small pool of vendors that will compete for contracts to provide data center outsourcing and infrastructure-cloud services to the US Army.

Overall, the quarterly results were an improvement from the previous quarter (Q4 2011), for which Verizon posted an EPS loss of $0.71.