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VMware Announces IoT Management Offering

The VMware Pulse IoT Center is in a private beta, and due "sometime" in 2017.

• By Keith Ward
• 05/10/2017

Gartner, Inc. recently estimated that there will be 8.4 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices in use this year. That's a lot of "things," and that means there will be a huge need for management of those "things." VMware hopes to be in that conversation, and to that end announced its first offering in this space -- the VMware Pulse IoT Center -- at the Dell EMC World conference this week.

The company touted Pulse IoT Center as "The first solution in a new family of VMware IoT offerings." It's an enterprise-scale solution for managing and securing IoT infrastructure from the edge to the cloud. And it will certainly need to scale hugely, as Gartner also predicted that the worldwide installed base of IoT endpoints will grow to 30 billion in 2020.

Pulse IoT Center uses technology from its hugely popular AirWatch endpoint management stack, combined with its vRealize Operations software for infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting.

An article in ZDNet quoted VMware CTO Ray O'Farrell on the motivation behind Pulse IoT Center: "The IoT focus has been around analytics, but trust and security are now key areas. Companies have less focus on the analytics and more on the nuts and bolts as the data makes its way back into the cloud and data center. Companies are beginning to realize that IoT analytics needs distributed infrastructure."

During his keynote at the show, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said Pulse IoT Center is part of "that infrastructure layer."

In a related announcement that should come as no surprise, Pulse IoT Center will be the "preferred" management and monitoring tools for Dell Edge Gateways. Dell has owned VMware since it bought parent company EMC last year. The Gateways are Atom-based Dell computers that aggregate and analyze data for IoT infrastructures.

Pulse IoT Center has no current release date beyond a VMware statement that it will be ready sometime in 2017. According to VMware, it's in a private beta program with customers in many of the areas most expected to have a large IoT presence: the automotive, entertainment, retail banking, health care and manufacturing industries.