VMware is predicting a strong second half of 2015, after reporting a solid second quarter that showed some good progress for the company's newer products.

It's part of the company's longer-term goal of reducing its dependency on vSphere.
In terms of license bookings, vSphere represented 40 percent of the total for the quarter, as opposed to 65 percent two years ago.

"Frankly, our goal is to get completely away from selling what we call naked vSphere," CFO Jonathan Chadwick said on the call.

The non-vSphere products include VMware's acquisitions of recent years, including Nicira (which yielded NSX, the network virtualization platform) and, more recently, Airwatch.

NSX has more than 700 customers and VSAN, another of VMware's relatively newer offerings, more than 2,000, said Carl Eschenbach said during the call. "We think we're going to see the impact of both of these in the second half and beyond," he added.

The number of NSX customers is up from the 400 paying customers that VMware reported in December. In May, VMware had reported that more than 50 of those had spent at least $1 million apiece on the platform.

For its second quarter, which ended June 30, VMware reported revenues of $1.52 billion and net income of $172 million, or 41 cents per share.

For the second quarter a year ago, VMware reported revenues of $1.45 billion and net income of $167 million, or 38 cents per share.

Non-GAAP earnings per share of 93 cents beat analysts' consensus forecast of 91 cents per share, according to Thomson Financial.

VMware shares were down a little more than 1 percent in early after-hours trading but recovered, trading up 56 cents (0.7%) at $83.75 at press time.