VMware, Inc. (NYSE:VMW) today announced the commercial availability of VMware Blockchain to provide a digital foundation that enterprises can trust to build business networks and deploy business-critical decentralized applications. With VMware Blockchain, businesses are provided an extensible and scalable enterprise-grade platform to unlock data silos and free up data to flow securely, privately and instantaneously.

Businesses run on data and workflows where shared sources of truth can create unrealized value, however complexities exist. Data is often siloed within enterprise boundaries, resulting in inefficient and costly steps to share and reconcile data across these boundaries. A trusted multi-party network is required in order to preserve integrity, enable privacy and to provide enterprise-grade resilience to a global ecosystem.

As enterprises rely on blockchain to handle multi-party transactions, a key factor in how well a blockchain platform performs and scales is the choice of the consensus mechanism deployed. VMware Blockchain’s Scalable Byzantine Fault Tolerance (SBFT), an enterprise-grade consensus engine developed internally by VMware Research, is designed to solve the problems of scale and performance in blockchain solutions while preserving fault-tolerance and defense against malicious attacks. SBFT maintains decentralized trust and supports ongoing governance in multi-party networks.

VMware Blockchain supports DAML, an open source smart contract language created by VMware Blockchain technology partner, Digital Asset. VMware Blockchain’s platform architecture includes a virtual smart contract execution engine that is designed to easily extend the platform to support additional smart contract languages.

A wave of building new critical infrastructure is underway for applications in financial services, manufacturing- and retail-driven supply chain, and healthcare industries that leverage blockchain technologies to help address the pain points experienced with disconnected, siloed systems.

For financial services firms, blockchain technologies radically streamline and simplify operations, allowing banks, broker-dealers, payment processors, and other financial institutions to dramatically shorten processing times, reduce manual processing and duplicative messaging, and create new profit centers with features such as simultaneous trade clearing and settlement.

VMware and Digital Asset have also been partnering with highly innovative customers, including Broadridge Financial Solutions and Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), that require resilient enterprise-grade technology as their foundation.