VMware Inc. made good on a promise made last week that it would deliver better-than-expected profits in its fiscal second-quarter earnings report.

The virtualization software company on Thursday reported a profit of $344 million for the quarter on revenues of $1.9 billion. The company also reported earnings after certain costs such as stock compensation of $1.19 per share, which is at the higher end of the $1.15 to $1.19 a share earnings it forecast.

Despite VMware signaling the higher results last week, the results outdid Wall Street analysts’ official expectations of a profit of $1.13 a share on $1.86 billion in revenue.

Shareholders had a muted reaction, with VMware’s stock down by about two-thirds of a point in after-hours trading. Then again, no major movements were anticipated following the 7 percent gains made last week after VMware delivered its pre-earnings forecast. The company’s stock price has performed well all year, rising by 28 percent since January. Update: Shares were rising nearly 3 percent in Friday morning trading.

One of the main reasons for last week’s gains was that VMware also announced it’s planning to raise up to $1 billion in debt, specifically senior notes, as part of a plan to buy back $1 billion in stock over the next year. Stock buybacks are often well received by shareholders as they reduce the overall number of shares available and thus put upward pressure on the share price.

The highlight of Thursday’s earnings call saw VMware report license revenue of $732 million for the second quarter, up 13.7 percent from the same period one year ago.

“We are very pleased with our Q2 results, which were driven by broad-based strength across the product portfolio in all three geographies,” said Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer at VMware. “As we continue our multi-year journey from a compute virtualization company to offer a broad portfolio of products driving efficiency and digital transformation, customers are increasingly turning to VMware to help them run, manage, secure and connect their applications across all clouds and all devices.”

The positive results come at a time when VMware is facing growing pressure from public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. VMware’s tactic in the face of this disruption has been to enter into new partnerships with its cloud rivals, branching out into new areas such as desktop virtualization, endpoint management, hyperconverged infrastructure and network virtualization.

VMware is due to host its VMworld 2017 conference next week in Las Vegas, where it’s expected to announce fresh details of its burgeoning relationships with these cloud providers.

Here’s a preview of what to expect at VMworld:

Image: Robert Hof