VMware reported another strong earnings quarter with $2.46 billion in third quarter fiscal 2020 revenue, which is a 12% increase from last year. The software giant also increased its guidance for Q4 and full-year 2020 revenue and said this boost in large part will come from its recent Carbon Black and Pivotal acquisitions.

VMware projects an increase in total revenue to $10.1 billion for the full year, which is up 12.5% compared to fiscal 2019. Carbon Black revenue will account for the largest portion of this revenue increase. And for the fourth quarter fiscal 2020, VMware expects total revenue to reach $2.95 billion up 13.8% year-over-year.

The Carbon Black deal closed in October, and VMware expects the Pivotal purchase to close before fiscal year end.

“VMware continues to be a juggernaut, contradicting its many critics,” said Forrester analyst Glenn O’Donnell in an email. “In the early days of IT, a popular adage was, ‘Nobody gets fired for buying IBM.’ You can adapt that now to: ‘Nobody gets fired for buying VMware.’ The fact is, VMware is now a ubiquitous platform far beyond just virtualization.”

While the strong Q3 earnings themselves weren’t particularly surprising, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger did say several interesting things on the conference call about the company’s business units and its opportunities in the near future. Here are the five most noteworthy moments from VMware’s Q3 earnings call.

Gelsinger said Carbon Black, when combined with VMware’s “security-driven value-add” from its networking and cloud infrastructure products represents about $1 billion of business for the company this year. “With Carbon Black, VMware is now poised to take a significant leadership role in security for the new age of multicloud modern apps and modern devices,” Gelsinger said. “We view security as an essential and common thread throughout our offerings.”

O’Donnell said the acquisition shows a lot of potential. “It is not yet exciting, but I believe it will be once VMware (and mother Dell) bake it into its various products,” he said. “If it’s done right, it could be as transformative to security as Nicera was to networking.”

Nicera is the SDN company VMware bought for $1.26 billion in 2012 and used as the basis for its NSX platform.

NSX license bookings increased 50% during the quarter. “We were super happy with NSX,” Gelsinger said. “And obviously the growth is being accelerated by VeloCloud and the inclusion of Avi into the platform. Eight of our top 10 deals included NSX and VeloCloud.”

VeloCloud is another acquisition. VMware folded that company’s Software-defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) technology into its NSX portfolio. This purchase moved VMware into the No. 1 or No. 2 SDWAN vendor spot, depending on which market report you believe. But VMware has yet to say how many customers use its SDWAN. And this is noteworthy because yesterday Cisco — the other No. 1 or No. 2 SDWAN vendor — said 20,000 customers use its SDWAN technology.

One of the investors on the call asked Gelsinger what he thought about the Pentagon awarding the $10 billion JEDI cloud infrastructure computing contract to Microsoft instead of Amazon. VMware has partnerships with all the major cloud infrastructure service providers including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and IBM. Amazon challenged the contract award in federal court, but no matter which cloud infrastructure service providers ultimately wins the deal, VMware will likely profit.

“Overall, we’re well-positioned with our current partnerships, and we do expect that through those partnerships that we’ll have a thriving government business both on-premise as we have had as well as in hybrid and cloud offerings,” Gelsinger said.

Gelsinger’s been touting VMware’s telco cloud infrastructure and 5G opportunities for a while, and the company’s investments in this space paid off during the third quarter. In September VMware expanded its multicloud infrastructure partnership with Deutsche Telecom, and recently added Millicom and NTT DoCoMo as customers. Earlier this month it previewed Project Maestro, a telco cloud infrastructure orchestrator, at VMworld Europe.

“As customers are looking to their 5G buildout, we see increasing interest in VMware solutions as key enablers of this critical transition,” Gelsinger said on the earnings call.

In fact, a question about Project Pacific was deemed “Pat’s favorite question.”

Gelsinger also kicked off VMworld in San Francisco this summer by announcing Tanzu, VMware’s new Kubernetes’ products and services portfolio. Project Pacific, currently in beta, embeds Kubernetes natively into vSphere, VMware’s virtualization platform, thus converging containers and virtual machines (VMs), and adding a container runtime into the hypervisor.

“Maybe since Java, we’ve not seen a technology or the VM itself as important as Kubernetes,” Gelsinger said. “We’ve been working on Project Pacific now for several years and we really see this ability to combine containers and VMs in a consistent operating environment gives customers the best of the world security, scalability, compliance, agility, and speed from containers for a new workload development.”