VMware has announced the general availability of VMware Pulse IoT Center, the company's first solution in its family of VMware Internet of Things (IoT) offerings.
The announcement marks another milestone in VMware's IoT mission. The company initially announced its strategy and intent to enter the IoT market in 2016 at VMworld.
VMware says they put the Pulse IoT Center through the paces of an extensive beta test with customers and partners in June 2017.
Companies across a broad range of vertical industries including automotive, entertainment, healthcare and industrial participated in the beta program.
The solution was initially unveiled at Dell EMC World in May last year which took place in Las Vegas. Since then, the company says it has been readying key partnerships to help customers better manage and monitor their ‘things' and infrastructure.
Some of these collaborations include ADLINK, Dell EMC, Eurotech, Fujitsu, Harman, Samsung, and SAP, among numerous other vendors in IoT.
VMware Pulse IoT Center is an enterprise-grade IoT device management and monitoring solution that helps both IT and operational technology (OT) organisations to manage, monitor and secure their IoT use cases.
Harman, an American subsidiary of Samsung, has teamed up with VMware Pulse IoT Center to complement its Smart Retail solution.
Harman's Smart Retail solution helps retailers comprehend their customers better by providing analytics on shopper behaviour through non-intrusive IoT sensors.
The sensors (Directional sensors, Grid-eye sensors) feed into an anonymous video analytics engine to get a heat-map view of the retail floor and real-time alerts for floor management services.
This also enables retailers to optimise shelf inventory, manage cooler stock and reduce store energy costs.
VMware IoT Pulse Center helps Harman manage and monitor its IoT technology in real time. The platform provides users with visibility and control of all things associated with the Smart Retail solution, as well as any other IoT use cases the user operates.