VMware saw revenues grow by a third year-on-year in its most recent financial quarter. Alongside financial reports from IBM and Intel, the company’s figures reveal that organisations are investing in their data centre systems in a big way.

Revenues hit $844 million for the three months ending 31 March 2011. Net income shot up 60% during the quarter to $126 million.

VMware saw revenues outside the US grow by 40%. CEO Paul Maritz remarked that the company has to date been heavily reliant on English-speaking markets, but that is beginning to change.

The company signed five major enterprise license agreements worth over $10 million during the quarter, pushing sales above its previous guidance.

Maritz attributed the company’s sales growth to customers’ progress along the ‘journey to the cloud’. "We believe that the IT continents really are shifting, driven by technologies like virtualisation and the cloud," he said. "The first aspect of this change is infrastructure-level transformation."

This wave of infrastructure investment will be followed by application modernisation, he said. "Beyond the transformation of infrastructure, we believe there is a comparable modernisation and transformation of application development."

The desire to capitalise on this second wave has been the motivation for VMware’s acquisitions of software development companies including SpringSource, RabbitMQ, Gemstone and most recently WaveMaker.