It was "a strong quarter by several measures," said Diane Greene in the prepared announcement of the quarter's results at the end of trading Wednesday.

She cited VMware's June 11 initial public offering which raised $957 million for a 10% public share of the company, its VMware World user group conference attended by 10,800, and revenues of $358 million compared to $189 million a year ago.

"We had solid growth during our first quarter as a public company," said Mark Peek, VMware CFO.

"We were pleased with our ability to grow operating income while continuing to invest in the business," he said in a prepared statement. Operating income was up 71% over the third quarter last year to $91 million.

VMware has typically had high R&D expenses as well as rapidly growing revenues and that proved to be the case in the first three quarters of 2007. Its financial statement said R&D for the nine-month period was $194 million versus $98 million the previous year; sales and marketing expenses were $311 million versus $158 million the previous year, and administrative costs were $97 million vs. $45 million.

VMware produces the ESX Server hypervisor for generating multiple virtual machines on a single server. It has built out a supporting framework for managing virtual machines, called Virtual Infrastructure 3, with its live migration VMotion tool part of its virtual machine management console.