VMware Joins Enterprise Internet of Things Industry Group

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VMware today signaled that it is bullish on the burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT) movement.

The virtualization heavyweight and EMC subsidiary announced that it joined the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), a non-profit organization whose aim is to advance IoT technologies. IIC was founded this year “to further development, adoption and wide-spread use of interconnected machines, intelligent analytics and people at work,” according to the group’s website.

Founding members include AT&T, Cisco, GE, IBM and Intel. The rest of the IIC’s roster reads like a Who’s Who of the IT industry. Dell, HP, Microsoft, Samsung and dozens of other organizations are IIC members.

“We chose to join the IIC because of its tenacious goal to accelerate IoT in the workplace, educate the industry on standards and deliver best practices for IoT,” said Sanjay Poonen, executive vice president and general manager of VMware End-User Computing, in a statement. For its part, VMware is lending the effort its “expertise in developing technology for connected devices, helping organizations implement mobile strategies and securing corporate information across device types and operating systems,” he added.

“We welcome their extensive experience in smart device management as we advance the mission of the IIC in the creation of testbeds and use cases,” stated the Industrial Internet Consortium’s executive director Dr. Richard Soley in prepared remarks.

In a company blog post, Poonen delved into how VMware plans to contribute to the enterprise IoT movement.

Four components are required for enterprise IoT solutions, asserted Poonen. These include, “a range of devices and sensors generating data; a scalable repository to store information; tools to analyze the data streams and tools for integration with enterprise systems to take appropriate actions.” EMC has experience in all of these areas, via VMware, Pivotal, Airwatch, which VMware acquired in January for $1.5 billion, and its own IT infrastructure business, he noted.

“The IoT opportunity is too large for one organization to tackle and partnerships are critical,” continued Poonen. “That’s why we at VMware chose to join the Industrial Internet Consortium.”

In March, Gartner forecast that by 2020, IoT will consist of 26 billion devices. In that same year, IoT vendors and service providers can expect to share in market fueled by $300 billion in incremental revenues.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.

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