VMware Blockchain is now available!
Today, we announce the initial availability of VMware Blockchain. Building upon the heritage of VMware’s enterprise digital foundation for any app, on any device, and on any cloud, we now provide an enterprise-grade blockchain platform that meets the needs of business-critical multi-party applications. This release is a culmination of collaborations with both industry-leading customers and ecosystem partners.
Blockchain and Enterprise — From Pilots to Production
Today’s multi-party enterprise workflows are fragmented and highly complex to maintain, resulting in delays, increased costs, and hindered innovation. Workflow data is often siloed within enterprise boundaries, resulting in inefficient and costly steps to share and reconcile data across these boundaries. To redefine these workflows, a new technology platform that provides a single source of truth across multiple parties is needed. Financial-services applications, where executing a transaction can take days to reconcile over multiple siloed systems, is now ripe to benefit from a redefined workflow. We have collaborated closely with multiple industry pioneers leveraging blockchain solutions in financial services infrastructure on the critical factors they require in a blockchain platform, such as:
- Consistency of data in the blockchain and resilience of the system in general; this is especially applicable for capital market infrastructure deployed on blockchain that needs to meet the stringent requirements to run key economic functions of a country
- Maintaining privacy and verifiable single source of truth for all parties to avoid the need to reconcile data
- Deep integration with smart contract languages to allow application developers access to all features and bring the best of the language and the platform
- Operational simplicity around deployment, observability, upgradability, and supportability
Enterprise customers are bringing their blockchain projects out of the labs and into production. Through these deep technical collaborations, combined with our foundational technical research and development, we have created VMware Blockchain with a comprehensive list of features required for enterprises to bring their business-critical use cases to production.
VMware Blockchain Features
Blockchain features can resemble sections of a computer science textbook. Here, we briefly describe VMware Blockchain features and explain how enterprises can benefit from these features:
- State Machine Replication: To ensure data consistency and resilience in even the most extreme failure scenarios, VMware Blockchain is built on Byzantine fault-tolerant state machine replication. Transactions coming into the platform are ordered through consensus and executed to change the state of the state machine.
- Privacy-aware Authenticated Key/Value Ledger: In order to prove facts about smart contracts on the platform and to allow access to a privacy-aware verifiable source of truth, VMware Blockchain stores the state of the blockchain in an authenticated key/value data structure. Data stored in this structure integrates with the smart contract layer to permit data access only to relevant parties in a multi-party workflow. This enables unique benefits like sub-transaction privacy.
- Deep Integration with DAML: With this release of VMware Blockchain, we support DAML dApps by natively integrating the DAML interpreter as a state machine in the platform. This gives customers developing DAML applications a consistent, highly available blockchain platform with a standard DAML Ledger API interface. We integrate and test these features, and VMware Blockchain production support includes support of the DAML interpreter and ledger API.
- Enterprise-grade Operational Capabilities: A consistent challenge that customers have shared with us is that deploying and supporting blockchain platforms is difficult and complex. With VMware Blockchain, we reduce that complexity by leveraging the investment and familiarity enterprise customers already have in their existing software-defined infrastructure. Deployment of VMware Blockchain is simplified to a five-minute process, thanks to a user-friendly orchestration tool that instantiates nodes as virtual machines running on our core vSphere technology. Rich monitoring and logging capabilities are available post-deployment. And as part of the VMware suite of products, customers get enterprise support for VMware Blockchain from VMware Global support: 24 x 7 x 365 access to our support team, case management tools, and dedicated SMEs for efficient resolution. These support services cover DAML components included in VMware Blockchain.
See the documentation for more details.
Customers Benefiting from Adopting VMware Blockchain
As one of the world’s top 10 listed exchange groups, the Australian Stock Exchange (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.”
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.”
Industry Experts and Proven Solution Partners
Recognizing that blockchain requirements and needs vary across enterprises, we are partnering with industry experts and solution partners to accelerate the adoption of blockchain. A strategic technology partner, Digital Asset, is the creator of the open-source DAML smart contract language. DAML is a framework for building connected applications that span data silos and trust boundaries, changing how businesses collaborate across industries.
“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.”
We are partnering with services partners such as Accenture, Infosys, and Intellect EU with proven capabilities in Enterprise Blockchain and the Financial Services sector strategy assessment, solution design, building, and implementation.
“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.”
VMware Has the Enterprise Mission at Its Core
VMware Blockchain has, at its core, the enterprise mission. Recognizing the importance of innovation, engineering excellence, and day-2 operations, we enable enterprises to bring their blockchain solutions to production, backed by ease of deployment, monitoring, management, and world-class support.
To learn more about VMware Blockchain:
- Visit our website at vmware.com/blockchain
- Request for information at ask_vmware_blockchain@vmware.com
