VMware’s long-awaited enterprise blockchain platform landed this week. The new service lets businesses build networks and deploy decentralized applications.

VMware first started talking about its enterprise blockchain platform in 2017 before launching a beta version at VMworld 2018. Meanwhile, other vendors including IBM and Microsoft have been shipping blockchain platforms since VMware began teasing its product. So it remains to be seen if the VMware’s product arrives too late in the game.

The new platform is built on VMware Blockchain’s Scalable Byzantine Fault Tolerance (SBFT), an enterprise-grade consensus engine developed internally by VMware Research. This fault-tolerant state machine replication ensures data consistency and resilience. Transactions that come into the platform are ordered through consensus and executed to change the state of the state machine.

VMware says it designed SBFT to solve the problems of scale and performance in blockchain platforms while preserving fault-tolerance and defense against attacks. SBFT maintains decentralized trust and supports ongoing governance in multi-party networks.

The platform stores the state of the blockchain in an authenticated key/value data structure. This data integrates with the smart contract layer to permit data access only to relevant parties in a multi-party workflow.

VMware Blockchain also supports DAML, an open source smart contract language created by VMware Blockchain technology partner Digital Asset. The platform architecture includes a virtual smart contract execution engine that can extend the platform to support additional smart contract languages in future releases.

A range of industries can benefit from blockchain technologies including those in financial services, manufacturing- and retail-driven supply chain, and healthcare, according to VMware. Financial services firms, for example, can use blockchain technologies to streamline operations, and thus shorten processing times, reduce manual processing and duplicative messaging, and create new profit centers with features such as simultaneous trade clearing and settlement.

In a blog post about the new platform, VMware highlights two financial services customers. Broadridge Financial Solutions, a global financial technology enterprise that processes trillions of dollars in transactions annually for thousands of counterparties, uses the platform to underpin its Distributed Ledger Technology Repurchase Agreement (DLT Repo) service. “VMware Blockchain provides a platform for us to model and enforce multi-party agreements on a Scalable Byzantine Fault Tolerant platform,” said Horacio Barakat, head of DLT Repo for Broadridge Financial Solutions in a statement. “This creates a single, shared and trusted, source of truth enabling the automation and digitization of repo processes and reducing reconciliation efforts.”

Additionally, the Australian Stock Exchange, which executes millions of trades every month with hundreds of thousands of investors relying on its infrastructure, uses VMware Blockchain to support increasing transaction volumes and enable secure data sharing that protects its customers’ privacy. “The combination of VMware Blockchain and Digital Asset’s expertise in smart contracts and distributed ledger technology is the right partnership to help us transform and modernize Australia’s financial market infrastructure,” said Dan Chesterman, CIO of ASX in a statement. “DLT can help financial services firms transform data, preserve privacy and confidentiality, and remove manual processes that exist in the industry.”