Looking to bridge the gap between developers and IT, VMware Inc. has a series of partnerships in an effort to accelerate the deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the enterprise.

On Tuesday, VMware said it was working with Bayshore Networks LLC, Dell Inc., Intwine Connect LLC, Deloitte Digital, PTC Inc. and V5 Systems Inc. to deploy and scale enterprise IoT platforms. Like many big infrastructure vendors, VMware is showing a big interest in enterprise IoT applications that can enable unified analytics, management and security.

The alliance comes hot on the heels of an open-source software development kit launched by VMware earlier this summer. That kit is designed to help developers “secure IoT gateway data and control orchestration applications,” VMware said at the time. The approach helps developers to determine the best way to obtain data from IoT devices and send it back to the data center.

The development kit also “provides the libraries to develop applications that connect and orchestrate data and control flows across things, gateways and the cloud,” said Bask Iyer, VMware’s CIO and senior vice president, in a blog post.

Regarding the new alliances, Iyer explained in a statement that VMware and its partners would be working to help businesses meet their strategic needs for IoT applications, analytics, hardware and services, with the goal being to extend their reach all the way from the data center to the cloud and the network edge.

VMware’s partners were just as keen to stress the need for open IoT app development.

“It’s critical to for us to work across multiple gateway platforms to deliver the scale required for industrial IoT,” said Francis Cianfrocca, founder and chief scientist at Bayshore Networks.

As part of the alliance, IoT specialist PTC will make its ThingWorx platform available to all of the partners. ThingWorx is billed as a platform that provides development tools for connecting IoT devices, while automating things such as real-time anomaly detection. In addition, the platform provides connectivity for industrial connections via a partnership with industrial automation specialist Kepware Technologies Inc.

Dell is playing a significant role in the alliance too, and claims that running the open framework for gateway application development on its Edge gateways will help to speed up both development and deployment.

According to industrial IoT specialist V5 Systems, the ability to connect data from network devices to the cloud will assist in connecting “nodes to one another as well as back to the cloud or datacenter.”

VMware’s IoT platform, called Liota (Little IoT Agent), is compatible with gateways and operating systems that support the Python programming language. As well as board, gateway and transport layers, Liota also incorporates a fourth “things” layer that allows developers to build “representative objects” for IoT devices that can connect to the gateway. Liota is available to download on GitHub.

VMware said it would extend its IoT alliances in future to expand possible use cases, particularly in industries such as healthcare, government, manufacturing and transportation.

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