VMware announces the launch of enterprise blockchain platform

VMware, Inc. announced the commercial availability of VMware Blockchain to provide a digital foundation that enterprises can trust to build business networks and deploy business-critical decentralized applications. With VMware Blockchain, businesses are provided an extensible and scalable enterprise-grade platform to unlock data silos and free up data to flow securely, privately and instantaneously.

Businesses run on data and workflows where shared sources of truth can create unrealized value, however complexities exist. Data is often siloed within enterprise boundaries, resulting in inefficient and costly steps to share and reconcile data across these boundaries. ​A trusted multi-party network is required in order to preserve integrity, enable privacy and to provide enterprise-grade resilience to a global ecosystem.

“We have been focused on building an enterprise-grade blockchain platform that meets the most stringent application requirements of the financial services industry and other mission-critical distributed workloads that require reliable and high-performance blockchain services,” said Brendon Howe, Vice President and General Manager, Blockchain, VMware. “VMware Blockchain delivers to customers the enterprise features they need for production today and the flexibility to adapt to future needs in the rapidly evolving blockchain space.”

Announced as a beta at VMworld 2018 Europe, VMware is bringing its industry-leading benefits to the VMware Blockchain platform to provide enterprise-grade capabilities such as: extensibility, security and privacy, performance, and scalability. Enterprises seek ecosystem friendly solutions that create a shared source of truth, and establish trust while maintaining privacy, making multi-party workflows far more efficient. Recognizing the importance of day-0 and day-2 operations to enable enterprises to bring their blockchain solutions to production, VMware provides a comprehensive set of operational capabilities, including ease of deployment, monitoring, management, upgradability, and world class support.

As enterprises rely on blockchain to handle multi-party transactions, a key factor in how well a blockchain platform performs and scales is the choice of the consensus mechanism deployed. VMware Blockchain’s Scalable Byzantine Fault Tolerance (SBFT), an enterprise-grade consensus engine developed internally by VMware Research, is designed to solve the problems of scale and performance in blockchain solutions while preserving fault-tolerance and defense against malicious attacks. SBFT maintains decentralized trust and supports ongoing governance in multi-party networks.

As the enterprise-grade platform for multi-party processes, VMware Blockchain brings a unique advantage of a layered architecture that decouples the ledger from the smart contract language. VMware Blockchain supports DAML, an open source smart contract language created by VMware Blockchain technology partner, Digital Asset. VMware Blockchain’s platform architecture includes a virtual smart contract execution engine that is designed to easily extend the platform to support additional smart contract languages.

A wave of building new critical infrastructure is underway for applications in financial services, manufacturing- and retail-driven supply chain, and healthcare industries that leverage blockchain technologies to help address the pain points experienced with disconnected, siloed systems. For financial services firms, blockchain technologies radically streamline and simplify operations, allowing banks, broker-dealers, payment processors, and other financial institutions to dramatically shorten processing times, reduce manual processing and duplicative messaging, and create new profit centers with features such as simultaneous trade clearing and settlement. VMware Blockchain is leading the way for financial services customers with partners including Accenture and Digital Asset.

“Our co-innovation with VMware on blockchain provides a new way of doing business that can benefit a number of industries,” said Yuval Rooz, co-founder and CEO of Digital Asset. “VMware Blockchain integrated with DAML smart contracts from Digital Asset provides privacy between participants in the same workflow. Now even competitors can collaborate on a distributed ledger with both trust and privacy.”

VMware and Digital Asset have also been partnering with highly innovative customers, including Broadridge Financial Solutions and Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), that require resilient enterprise-grade technology as their foundation.

A well-known global financial technology enterprise that processes trillions of dollars in transactions annually for thousands of counterparties, Broadridge Financial Solutions, recognized the need for an enterprise-grade blockchain platform to underpin its Distributed Ledger Technology Repurchase Agreement (DLT Repo) solution. “Broadridge is focused on developing blockchain-based solutions to transform capital market’s infrastructure, and help our clients gain operational efficiencies and create new opportunities,” said Horacio Barakat, Head of DLT Repo for Broadridge Financial Solutions. “VMware Blockchain provides a platform for us to model and enforce multi-party agreements on a Scalable Byzantine Fault Tolerant platform. This creates a single, shared and trusted, source of truth enabling the automation and digitization of repo processes, and reducing reconciliation efforts.”

As one of the world’s top 10 listed exchange groups, ASX executes millions of trades every month with hundreds of thousands of investors relying on its infrastructure. ASX required a new solution that would support increasing transaction volumes and enable secure data sharing that protects its customers’ privacy. “The combination of VMware Blockchain and Digital Asset’s expertise in smart contracts and distributed ledger technology is the right partnership to help us transform and modernize Australia’s financial market infrastructure,” said Dan Chesterman, chief information officer of ASX. “DLT can help financial services firms transform data, preserve privacy and confidentiality, and remove manual processes that exist in the industry.”

“By unlocking the real potential of data in our digital world, multiparty systems, supported by blockchain, are reshaping industries and transforming the way companies work together. It’s reshaping financial services, for example, by reimagining how transactions are executed, from payments to post-trade processing,” said David Treat, senior managing director, Global Blockchain and Multiparty Systems Lead, Accenture. “Leveraging the powerful technologies from VMware and Digital Asset, combined with Accenture’s deep industry expertise, we’re providing these capabilities so clients can expand into new products and services while also streamlining operations as they develop, manage and deploy complex multiparty workflows.”