While the sun baked Las Vegas streets to 105 degrees Fahrenheit during last week's #VMworld, #VMware honed its internet of things partnerships and touted a strategy of being the data center tier for directing billions of smart endpoints.
Just as VMware tries to position itself as the premier provider of monitoring and management tools in the cloud ecosystem with its Cloud Foundry offering, the company is also positioning itself as the management layer for data center integration with a growing legion of internet of things ( #IoT ) product providers.
With its ecosystem of leading IoT partners, VMware is trying to bridge the gap between the operational technology (OT) and IT worlds and extend data center expertise out to IoT endpoints. VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger highlighted this potential in his keynote address, citing IDC data on the coming IoT opportunity as a $357 billion market in the U.S. and nearly $1.3 trillion internationally by 2019.
"VMware sees considerable potential in the IoT space, and it was important for us to align with partners that would both complement and enhance our proven enterprise device management offerings as we extend our technology to manage, monitor and secure IoT use cases from edge to cloud," said Bask Iyer, CIO and general manager for IoT at VMware. "Rapid application enablement and analytics are important components of the new connected offerings that we will extend to our customers."
VMware recently developed a software developer's kit (SDK) for building mid-tier IoT gateways called Liota, short for Little IoT Agent. This allows developers to rapidly code and deploy gateways between physical IoT devices in the field and IT applications.
http://searchvmware.techtarget.com/feature/VMware-focuses-on-IoT-partners-and-strategy-at-VMworld-2016
