Blockchain is rapidly rising up the enterprise priority stack, though as we noted recently, it’s still got a way to go before it’s widely deployed in business.
Some longtime information technology industry observers predict that blockchain digital ledger will totally disrupt business as we know it within a few years. More blockchain pilots are making the transition to full production, especially for financial, supply chain and business-to-business applications.
Startups are also pouring into the blockchain market, which speaks to the pace of innovation in this arena but also to the degree of immaturity. Today’s blockchain startups will need to show that they have staying power and can ride a “land-and-expand” strategy to greater success. Leading startups in blockchain software and tooling for broad enterprise deployments include BigchainDB GmbH, Blockstream Inc., Bluzelle Networks Pte Ltd., Context Labs, Digital Asset Holdings LLC, Guardtime and Symbiont.io Inc.
However, none of these startups has established itself as the pacesetter in this arena in the way that, say, Cloudera Inc. did for the Hadoop software for big data and Databricks Inc. did for the streaming data software Spark. Just as with the Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, TensorFlow and other growth segments, it will take a few years before enterprises know which of the hot startups will survive and how their incumbent platform providers will incorporate this new technology into their solution portfolios.
In part because of this immaturity and the lack of a blockchain killer app in the general business market, many C-level executives are keeping their distance from this technology for the time being.
Wikibon believes that to be considered mature enough for broad enterprise deployment, a commercial blockchain platform would need to meet the following criteria:
According to these criteria, it’s doubtful whether we can regard industry blockchain consortia as providing enterprise-grade platforms. Though some industry observers describe them as such, many of them — most notably, ethereum Project, Quorum, R3 Corda and Ripple — are focused on financial and cryptocurrency applications running in public or community clouds.
Of the principal blockchain projects, only the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric is likely to become the standardized foundation for truly enterprise-grade open-source blockchains. Contributed by IBM Corp. and Digital Asset, Hyperledger, now in version 1.0, boasts more than 185 collaborating enterprises across finance, banking, the “internet of things,” supply chain, manufacturing and technology.
Let’s sort through the recent blockchain-related platform and tooling announcements from established enterprise IT solution providers. Wikibon is seeing increasing activity from major vendors — especially Amazon Web Services Inc., IBM, Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. — to bring blockchain platforms, tools and applications into their core solution portfolios for robust multicloud deployments.
AWS recently launched new preset templates for rapid creation, deployment and securing blockchains in the AWS cloud. Accessible through this get-started page, these templates make it easier for developers to create blockchains on either of two blockchain versions: ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric.
AWS’s templates create peer-to-peer blockchains in which each participant has access to a shared ledger where the immutable, independently verifiable transactions are recorded. Users can leverage managed, certified AWS CloudFormation templates to automate the deployment of Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric frameworks as well as additional required components. The blockchains may be deployed on Amazon Elastic Container Service or ECS clusters, or directly on an EC2 instance running Docker. Blockchains are created in the user’s own Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, allowing use of their PC subnets and network Access Control Lists.
