VMware ended its latest fiscal year on a down note as the software giant struggled with integrating its vast trove of acquisitions and somehow stumbled on closing large contracts before the clock struck 12. The earnings were more surprising considering how well it was doing leading into the final quarter of its fiscal year.

For the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2020, VMware’s revenues increased 11.4% year over year to $3.1 billion, and were up 12.5% for the entire year to $10.8 billion. Both of those numbers came in ahead of the company’s forecasts, but below more bullish analyst expectations.

More depressing for investors, VMware’s net income for the quarter dropped from $496 million in fiscal 2019, to $321 million for its latest quarter. But for the full year, net income increased from $1.6 billion in 2019 to $6.4 billion in 2020.

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger copped to the fact that the vendor came up short for the quarter.

“Although we had good bookings performance for the quarter and year, revenue came in a bit short of expectations due to a higher mix of subscription and [software-as-a-service], as well as linked quarter deal execution challenges, in particular with regard to the volume of deals at the end of the quarter,” Gelsinger said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript of the earnings call.

Gelsinger got specific in noting that it had a “very large deal come in an hour after our bookings cut off. And those are the kinds of things we just can’t allow to have happen to our execution.”

Despite that inability to close, Gelsinger did note that the company closed 31 deals worth more than $10 million each during the quarter compared to 23 such deals a year ago. "We simply had too much to get done at the end of the quarter," he added.

VMware also noted in its Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing that the government agency had "requested documents and information related to VMware’s backlog and associated accounting and disclosures."

Looking ahead, VMware said it expects fiscal 2021 revenues to grow at a more modest 11.5%. Analysts didn’t take that forecast well.

“Management expects better performance in [fiscal year 2022], but that is a long way away,” noted BMO Capital Markets’ Keith Bachman in a research note.

Like a number of other companies, VMware said it does expect an impact from the current coronavirus outbreak, with a particular impact in its Asia-Pacific business. “We’re monitoring the situation closely and have not included any further impact for Q1 or for the full year at this time,” noted VMware CFO Zane Rowe.

VMware’s stock lost 11% on Friday after the earnings were released, despite the broader Nasdaq actually posting a slight gain during a heavily volatile week.

As part of its forecast, Rowe said that the company does not expect its Pivotal division to “have a material impact on our expected growth rate for fiscal 2021.” That Pivotal division is the one that VMware paid $2.7 billion for just over six months ago.

“Pivotal is in the process of creating a [platform-as-a-service] version for Kubernetes in fiscal 2021, and we expect Pivotal’s contribution to VMware’s growth will increase in future years as it becomes part of our applications business,” Rowe said on the call.

That deal also drew the ire of Bachman, who noted that “we find it difficult to conclude that Pivotal is adding to shareholder value.”

Back on the earnings call, Gelsinger also continued to prime VMware’s cloud-native pump, citing upcoming launches tied to its Kubernetes-focused Tanzu project and its broader Project Pacific. Tanzu is VMware’s overarching Kubernetes play that includes the Pivotal assets and will be home to its Project Pacific that embeds Kubernetes natively into VMware’s vSphere virtualization platform. VMware has been hinting that it expects to soon announce updates to both platforms.

Gelsinger noted that those projects were part of VMware’s “five pillar strategy” going forward. This strategy includes a base of its VMware Cloud and VMware Cloud Foundation offerings, with its Tanzu, NSX, and “intrinsic security platform with Carbon Black” sitting on top.

“So this year is really a transition year for the business in our fiscal year 2021, as we get it to that point that it really is a complete set of Kubernetes services well integrated with VMware and a key component of the overall Tanzu portfolio,” Gelsinger said.

As for its $2.1 billion purchase of Carbon Black, Gelsinger said that VMware has already added more than 5,000 new customers to that business, which doubled Carbon Black’s total customer base to more than 10,000.

Gelsinger said that Carbon Black sat alongside CrowdStrike as the “two new guys” versus the “old guys” in the space.

“The security industry today is highly bespoke, highly fragmented, way too many products, complexity for customers to manage and validating and putting these pieces together, this has to come to an end,” Gelsinger said on the earnings call. “And that's really the strategy that we've laid out is to bring security intrinsically into the core platforms, redefine these categories, minimize the space that customers need to test, validate, operationalize by making it part of the environments that they're already running.”

VMware COO Sanjay Poonen this week also touted Carbon Black opportunity, telling SDxCentral at the RSA conference that “we see a tremendous opportunity to create a multi-billion-dollar security company. And we have a starting point of a billion, so that’s a really good place to start.”