HARMAN, the connected car solution provider recently acquired by Samsung, will join forces with Dell’s cloud infrastructure company VMware in the latest Internet of Things (IoT) partnership. The collaboration will focus on delivering industry-specific IoT solutions for businesses in the automotive, retail, industrial, energy efficiency and building management industries, as well as for communications service providers (CSPs).
The crux of the partnership will see an integration of HARMAN’s over-the-air (OTA) software update solutions with VMware’s vCloud Network Functions Virtualization platform and its associated IoT management capabilities. VMware’s software-defined network infrastructure offers CSPs flexibility as network architectures transition to 5G, and the HARMAN integration promises CSPs solutions to expand into new markets and launch new services.
The partnership also seeks to offer IoT solutions tailored to specific vertical markets. Automotive solutions will focus on simplifying OTA automotive updates and monitoring of endpoints. Retail solutions will revolve around mapping in-store shopper behavior, optimizing inventory and other IoT analytics. Industrial solutions will focus on factory automation and management, as well as predictive maintenance. Finally, solutions for smart buildings will seek to optimize energy, space and occupant comfort.
“As industries ramp up efforts to adopt IoT, this one-of-a-kind offering allows enterprises across all verticals to benefit from simplified solutions that elevate their services to a more sophisticated and innovative degree,” said HARMAN’s Sanjay Dhawan. “HARMAN and VMware’s complementary IoT offerings will change the landscape for nontraditional technology companies, providing them with new growth opportunities that will set them apart from their competitors.”
VMware and HARMAN join the growing number of IoT collaborations and acquisitions being announced this year, including Accenture and Altitude, Autodesk and Nutonian,Autodesk and Jumper,Seebo and IBM, Bosch and IBM and PTC and everybody. Although we’ve yet to see how all these partnerships will play out, it seems that when it comes to IoT, there’s strength in numbers.