Dell Technologies Inc. and VMware Inc. said on Wednesday they’re teaming up with Microsoft Corp. to offer a jointly designed “internet of things” product aimed at boosting IoT adoption in specific markets.

The “joint solution” the companies are referring to is really just a mashup of some of their existing products. Microsoft is offering its Azure IoT Edge application, Dell is providing its dual-core Atom Edge Gateways and VMware is throwing in its Pulse IoT Center that’s used to manage and monitor connected devices.

The combination of these technologies will enable “streamlined management, centralized monitoring and security from devices to the cloud,” the companies said. The offering is targeted at “scenarios like predictive maintenance, supply chain visibility and other use cases,” they added.

VMware’s Pulse IoT Center is essentially the glue that binds Dell’s Gateway hardware and connected sensors and devices to Microsoft Azure IoT Edge, which in turn provides the “intelligence” these devices need to “act locally” and coordinate with each other. The companies said although the new product is optimized for Dell’s Edge Gateway, it can also manage, monitor and secure a combination of other provider’s gateways and edge systems.

The announcement seems particularly important for Dell, which had a largely subdued presence in the IoT space until last October, when it launched its dedicated IoT business armed with $1 billion for research purposes. IoT was also a hot topic at this week’s Dell Technologies World conference, where the company tried to position itself as the infrastructure provider for compute power at the network edge, which is needed to analyze data for artificial intelligence.

“We’ve positioned ourselves as the central infrastructure company,” Michael Dell, founder and chief executive officer of Dell, said in an interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile TV studio. “We’re on the [network] edge, [we] have a distributed core.”

With that positioning, it makes sense to enter into partnerships with companies such as Microsoft, one analyst suggested. Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc., said enterprises that want to build next-generation IoT applications can seldom rely on a single vendor.

“Corporate executives look for solutions that move the integration burden from them to partnerships, and this Dell, Microsoft and VMware partnership is a good example to make this happen,” Mueller said. “The combination creates a complete solution to provision, run and integrate the IoT edge with the rest of the enterprise.”

The companies said their new IoT offering will be available starting in the second half of 2018.

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