VMware launches its IoT Management Solution

VMware has unveiled its Pulse IoT Center Management solution that will enable information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) teams to have complete control of their IoT infrastructure and things. The first solution in a family of VMware IoT offerings, VMware Pulse IoT Center will help customers to more efficiently manage, operate, scale and protect their IoT projects from the edge to the cloud.

Gartner estimates that through 2020, 90 per cent of IoT projects will use some form of IoT gateway. (1) Additionally, the worldwide installed base of IoT endpoints is expected to grow from 12.1 billion at the end of 2015 to more than 30 billion in 2020, according to IDC. (2) As IoT becomes prevalent in the enterprises, organizations need a simplified approach to manage, monitor and secure their infrastructure and data.

“As enterprises look to transform into digital businesses, this creates an opportunity for IT and OT teams to collaborate as they embrace IoT to improve operations within their business, while generating new forms of revenue,” said Mimi Spier, Vice-President, IoT, VMware. “We’re leveraging our expertise and proven success in the enterprise and applying it to IoT infrastructure and across all ‘things’. VMware Pulse IoT Center will provide IT and OT teams visibility and control across their IoT use-cases, while offering peace of mind with security capabilities throughout the IoT value chain.”

VMware Pulse IoT Center will simplify the complexity of managing customers’ IoT infrastructure and their diverse types of things as easily as one. It will help improve reliability of infrastructure by providing accurate and real-time visibility of ‘thing’ health to enable customers to proactively address anomalies before they arise. VMware Pulse IoT Center will help accelerate RoI by streamlining how IoT projects gets deployed and scaled. Additionally, it will enable security across things, edge, network and applications to further protect IoT infrastructure and data access.

This solution focussed on enterprise IoT, leverages existing, proven technologies from both VMware AirWatch for device management and VMware vRealize Operations for infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting. It has been built to meet the specific, complex needs of IoT for both IT and OT teams, while supporting a broad range of edge systems and their connected devices. VMware Pulse IoT Center, which will be available as both a simple to deploy on-prem solution and as a Service offering, is currently in private beta with customers across automotive, entertainment, retail banking, health care and manufacturing industries.

Dell EMC will be offering VMware Pulse IoT Center as the preferred enterprise management and monitoring solution for Dell Edge Gateways to help customers easily manage all their IoT devices through a single tool. Dell Technologies’ broad IoT infrastructure enables customers’ digital transformation from edge to core to cloud.

This announcement is VMware’s latest in IoT. The company has announced several key relationships including Deloitte, EuroTech, Fujitsu, HARMAN, ThingWorx and Viz Explorer, in the lead up to today’s news. In 2016, it launched Liota (Little IoT Agent), a vendor-neutral open-source software development kit (SDK) for building secure IoT data and control orchestration applications.

VMware Pulse IoT Center is expected to become available in the calendar year 2017. Pricing will be announced upon general availability. The solution will be sold as both a standalone solution by VMware and partners as well as a bundled offering via partners such as Dell EMC and others.

VMware will demonstrate VMware Pulse IoT Center at its booth (#1143 – Sands Expo Hall C) during Dell EMC World (May 8-11).