Speakers from the technology community included Anant Kadiyala, Director of Blockchain & Industry Solutions at Oracle; IBM’s David Noller, Executive Architect Watson IoT – Blockchain and Industry 4.0; and Steven Kim, a Senior Director at SAP. The user community was represented by Jeff Denton, the Senior Director of Global Secure Supply Chain at AmerisourceBergen.
Blockchain technology is incredibly elastic. It can be shaped in different ways, to fit different processes, network node architectures, and participants. It is difficult to generalize about blockchain for business in a way that is universally true. But IBM, Oracle, and SAP – probably the three largest players in the business application blockchain space – were all addressing this topic in a very similar way.
One point all participants agreed on is that blockchain for business applications is not Bitcoin. Bitcoin was the first blockchain application, it is an unregulated shadow-currency, and it is widely seen as a mechanism more conducive to financial speculation than conducting business.
IBM, Oracle, and SAP all built their blockchain platforms on Hyperledger, a technology more suitable to building business applications. Like blockchain for cryptocurrencies, there are mechanisms to make sure transactions are authenticated across a network of participants with distributed databases.
There are several differences between cryptocurrencies and blockchain for SCM. Business blockchain does not include a cryptocurrency, although there may be network style applications that develop that will punch out to the banking system; it is not an open community that any participant can join, but will instead generally involve closed networks of supply chain partners that have been invited to join (permissioned blockchains); blockchain for managing an end to end SCM process can, and probably will, include more business logic and can even utilize IoT sensor data.
Read more at The Growing Maturity Of Blockchain For Supply Chain Management
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