The NSX network virtualization platform has 150 customers and a run rate of $100 million, VMware officials said during their earnings call yesterday.

The "run rate" probably means NSX brought in $25 million in revenues last quarter, although VMware didn't word it that way. The customer count of 150 is up from the 100 that CEO Pat Gelsinger declared during a financial conference in June.

Some of those customers have come up with an intriguing use case: microsegmenting their networks as a way of enforcing security, Gelsinger said.

The gloves are definitely off between Cisco and VMware as the two battle for SDN supremacy. It's been a verbal battle so far, as Cisco's ACI isn't fully available yet —but that situation is due to change any day now.

But while Cisco has gone out of its way to peg NSX as ACI's top competitor, VMware is still trying to say nice. "As we said before, we love Cisco gear. We don’t need them to lose and many NSX customers are using it," Gelsinger said on the call.

Even if he believes that in his heart of hearts, the opposite isn't true. That is — it's very likely that any given NSX customer owns Cisco gear, because "everybody" uses Cisco. But if someone chooses Cisco's ACI, they're not going to tack NSX onto it.

VMware has also added NSX to its price list, meaning the reseller channel can offer it. That was announced in June to some controversy, as the list price — $5,996 per CPU or $34 per virtual machine per month — seemed high. It's worth noting that pretty much nobody pays list price.

Separately, EMC, which announced earnings this morning, increased its share buyback program to $3 billion from $2 billion for 2014.

That might be an attempt to appease unruly investors. EMC is about to face pressure from hedge fund Elliott Management to spin off VMware, The Wall Street Journal reported last week. (EMC owns about 80 percent of VMware.)

Earnings-call quotes taken from a transcript by Seeking Alpha.