24/7 Wall St.

VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW) is seeing a strong reaction to its corporate earnings report. Its third quarter sales were broadly in-line with analyst expectations, but earnings managed to beat the consensus analyst estimates. The VMware report always tends to have a reflection on EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) as EMC is the super-majority shareholder here.

VMware’s earnings came in at 20% growth in operations at $0.84 per share and revenue was up 14% to $1.29 billion in the quarter. The consensus analyst estimates were $0.82 in earnings per share and were $1.29 billion in sales for the quarter. What stands out is that sales growth would have been 19% if you exclude GoPivotal and divestitures from this year. WMware’s operating margin was 33.9% in the last quarter.

The bias of the call was very positive, as comments of being very pleased with results were followed with continuing to gain momentum globally. VMware is also seeing strong customer demand and talked up its prospects for the software defined data center.

We did not see guidance so we will hold off on judgment until later. VMware shares closed up 1.5% at $82.65 on Monday and the after-hours trading session had shares up almost 4% more at $85.92. The stock’s 52-week trading range is $64.86 to $99.55.

EMC shares closed up 0.6% at $25.24 and its shares were up close to another 3.5% or so around $26 on last look. Its earnings estimates are $0.45 EPS on sales of $5.8 billion.