Mimi Spier VP, VMware IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a critical part of any modern organization’s digital transformation story. Connecting the physical and digital worlds, IoT has unleashed a whole new world of possibilities that can transform your customer’s experience, create new business models and improve business agility. In my conversations with customers, I find that enterprises fully understand the importance and power of IoT but hesitate to fully embrace it because of its many challenges: mainly management, security and scale. – By Mimi Spier VP, VMware IoT

On October 10th Dell Technologies was sharing with the world our approach to the Internet of Things and how we can help companies make IoT real and implementable. We are announcing new IoT specific products, labs, partner program and consumption models and VMware plays a key part in this story.

VMware and the Internet of Things

Traditionally VMware has been helping companies manage and optimize their datacenters. As their businesses evolved to include workspaces, we evolved alongside to help them manage all the devices and apps within their workspace and now it just makes sense for us to take all our trusted technology and capabilities and apply it at the edges of the business where all “things” reside and help our customers manage this next stage of their evolution. 

Insights vs Infrastructure plane

When you talk about Enterprise IoT, it’s helpful to think of an IoT-ready architecture in terms of an Insight plane and an Infrastructure plane. The “Insight plane” is where all the insight rich data from connected things is analyzed to drive business decisions, processes and use cases whereas the “infrastructure layer” refers to the IoT infrastructure itself along with the capabilities to manage, monitor and secure it. A lot of focus is given to the data generated from things and how helpful it is – which is a great problem to solve. However, what about the things themselves? Are they enterprise grade? Who is managing, these? Are they secure? There is a whole IoT infrastructure layer underneath which enables the “insight” plane and is integral to any IoT implementation. All (or most) of Dell’s IoT offerings fall in this category. VMware IoT solutions especially focus on this plane to provide and enable IoT infrastructure and make IoT real.

Introducing VMware Pulse IoT Solutions

Earlier this year, VMware announced a new family of IoT solutions called VMware Pulse.

The first product in this family is VMware Pulse IoT Center which is an enterprise grade, end to end IoT infrastructure management solution that helps organizations onboard, manage, monitor and secure all their connected things and gateways from the edge all the way to the cloud. With Pulse IoT Center, IT gets the visibility they need and OT gets the control they require – all in one single console. Today Dell Technologies already provides Edge Gateways, which can be secured and managed by VMware Pulse IoT Control Center.

I am also excited to share ‘Project Fire’ – a hyper converged platform that is a future product of the VMware Pulse family of IoT solutions. Gartner predicts by 2022, 75% of enterprise generated data will be created and processed outside the data center or cloud, up from just 10% today. For this to happen we need edge devices to have compute and storage capabilities to power edge analytics which the majority of things and sensors like smart cameras, smart lights, smart meters etc. do not have. This is where hyperconvergence at the IoT Edge can come be a game changer. At VMware we are taking the highly successful concept of virtualization in the datacenter and bring it to the edge.

By providing compute, storage and network capabilities to these little microdatacenters you can fully realize the benefits of a fully distributed IoT architecture where your analysis is split between the cloud and the edge based on your use cases and needs. You also get to enjoy the same benefits of virtualization you see in the cloud by lowering your total cost of ownership and flexibility to scale.  ‘Project Fire’ enables users to roll-out IoT use cases faster and have consistent infrastructure software from edge to core to cloud.

Mimi Spier

VP, VMware IoT