VMware’s been on a tear lately, unveiling the new Solution Exchange, an online virtualization and cloud solutions marketplace.  It’s a hub where customers, partners and developers can converge, simplifying the process around choosing business solutions.

The new Marketplace centralizes efforts around a self-service portal, extending VMware’s resources to a broader audience that may be seeking solutions for the private and public cloud.  Boasting a community of more than 2,000 technology partners that have built some 3,500 applications and 6,000 infrastructure products, this new Marketplace is really a storefront of sorts for VMware’s growing portfolio.

The new marketplace comes days after the company reported its results for the fourth quarter of 2011, showing strong growth and beating Wall Street’s expectations.

Profit rose to 46 cents a share or $200.4 million from 28 cents a year ago, which added up to $119.9 million. Analysts forecasted  the firm will report something closer to 42 cents a share.

Sales have also seen impressive growth in Q4. VMware generated $1.06 billion in revenue, up 27 percent from the same period last year and just ahead of the average amount that’s been expected.

“The stock rose 4.4 percent to $89.80 yesterday after the company released its fourth-quarter earnings and first-quarter sales forecast,” reports Bloomberg. “The shares had fallen 2.4 percent to $86 at the close in New York.”

While VMware is seeing growth, it has just lost a key executive to a Hadoop startup.  Alan Geary, who served as senior director of worldwide partner field operations for the software maker for the past seven years, has received a better offer from MapR – a company that offers a commercial Hadoop distribution competing with Cloudera’s. Geary is assuming a new title, senior director of worldwide business development, though the job description remains just about the same.

MapR has tapped VMware’s HR, while EMC is making use of its virtualization technology to enhance its own portfolio. The storage maker owns a 90% cut of the publicly-traded VMware, and has also seen exceptional growth in Q4. That has been steady throughout the entire year, though this latest quarter stands out in several ways, primarily due to the positive light it reflects on enterprise IT spending. EMC’s revenue rose by 14 percent in the past 12 months, indicating that companies are still very much occupied with upgrading their IT infrastructure, in spite of what Oracle says.