VMware is taking to the cloud with VMware Pulse IoT Center, its edge infrastructure and lifecycle management platform, which it plans to offer as a service in conjunction with partners later this year.

In addition to the move to the cloud, VMware Pulse IoT Center 2.0 enhances "fine-grained management of the entire lifecycle of IoT/Edge devices, connected sensors and applications," starting with device registration and on-boarding, according to a post on the VMware blog published Tuesday, signed by Mimi Spier, VMware vice president for the Internet of Things business.

SaaS services will be hosted by VMware now, with VMware Cloud Provider partners providing hosting later this year, VMware says.

In addition to registration and onboarding, the VMware IoT service provides security, systems management, over-the-air updates, container management and alerts and notifications.

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Why this matters
The Internet of Things and 5G go hand in hand, and together they'll transform the economy over the next generation. Literally billions of devices in factories, planes, trains, medical facilities, retail stores and homes -- everywhere -- will come online, generating oceans of data and requiring immediate insight from the edge of the network, where response times and latency are fast. IoT creates massive management and orchestration challenges, which create big opportunities for service providers to solve that problem for enterprises. Service provides can partner with VMware to provide Pulse IOT to enterprise customers later this year. VMware isn't alone trying to solve these problems for enterprises; competitors including Cisco are making IoT strategic, as are the hypercloud providers.

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— Mitch Wagner Executive Editor, Light Reading