VMware had its earnings call today, rounding up the second quarter of fiscal year 2011. The company reported some impressive figures indicating a fair amount of growth- U.S revenues grew 35 percent year-over-year to $450 million, while international revenues grew 38 percent to $471 million. Wall Street estimates averaged only $873 billion. Earnings were 37 percent from the second quarter of 2010 at $220 million, or 51 cents (55 cents non-GAAP), compared to expectations of 47 cents a share.

Reuters cited an analyst with an optimistic view of the virtualization giant:

“They are a next-generation company. They are redefining what the new architecture should look like when services are delivered from the cloud,” said Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with Global Technology Research.”

Breaking down the numbers, service revenues were up 30 percent at a mere $456 million, and license revenues were up 44 percent at $465 million. The latter will most likely see even more growth in Q3 as companies spend more on vSphere 5.0 licenses, but VMware is looking to further monetize this business.  EMC’s virtualization subsidiary changed its licensing model from charging based on processor cores and physical memory to set a price tag on a per-CPU-socket price and vRAM basis. This means its offering is about to get more expensive for customers, and InfoWorld’s Peter Bruzzese thinks that will be driving customers away to Microsoft’s Hyper-V. This is because less popular open-source offerings will not be a common choice, due to the ease of use, support and overall premium sense that they got used to with vSphere.

But the company has faith in its strategy for the next quarter. It reported a strong forecast expecting Q3 revenue to range between $915 million and $940 million, compared to analysts’ average estimate of  $898 million. VMware is coming off a major product launch that’s boosted some extra faith in its vision, and the coming quarters will determine if the company’s claims pan out as presented.