VMware announces new service to provide permissioned blockchain for enterprise consortiums

VMware, a provider of cloud computing and platform virtualization software and services, has announced a new service which will provide permissioned blockchain for enterprise consortiums.

At VMworld 2018 Europe, the company officially announced the beta launch of “VMWare Blockchain”, which it says is “intrinsically more secure than public blockchains.”

VMware Blockchain will particularly focus on moving enterprise blockchain consortiums from conception into full-scale production. It will provide the foundation for decentralized trust while delivering enterprise-grade scalability, reliability, security and manageability, VMware said.

“The service will be integrated into existing VMware tools to help protect the network and compute functions that underlie a true enterprise blockchain,” it added.

According to the official release, the service has been designed to solve challenges in three key areas:

• “True decentralized trust, with the ability to deploy nodes across multiple different cloud environments including on-premises managed nodes;
• Robust day-two operations, supported by VMware Blockchain’s availability as a managed SaaS platform, single pane of glass management interface and enterprise monitoring and auditing tools
• Developer-friendly offerings, which includes tooling for smart contract CI/CD; rich developer guides, API documentation and sample code and an open source foundation in Project Concord.”

VMware said it is teaming up with Dell Technologies, Deloitte and WWT to develop and support the service. In addition, IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions will support VMware Blockchain.

In August 2018, VMware officially introduced Project Concord – a highly scalable and energy-efficient distributed trust infrastructure for consensus and smart contract execution.