Blockchain eases its way into business standards
The roller-coaster cryptocurrency called bitcoin has given its underlying technology a bad name. Surveys by World Wide Worx of corporations and small and medium enterprises in South Africa showed that, after the recent bitcoin boom and bust, what little enthusiasm there was for blockchain, a digital form of distributed ledger, has all but evaporated.
Now, however, blockchain is likely to shed the T-shirt of speculation, and don the formal suit of business purpose.
On Tuesday last week, the Reserve Bank announced the successful conclusion of Project Khokha, a proof of concept designed to simulate a real-world trial of blockchain in the wholesale payment system. The trial showed that the daily volume of the South African payments system could be processed in less than two hours using the technology.
The next day, on the other side of the world, enterprise resource planning software giant SAP unveiled an initiative to make blockchain a standard business service. At its Sapphire Now conference in Orlando, Florida, it announced SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain, through which customers can build their own blockchain projects in the cloud. In other words, it has leveraged the concept of software-as-aservice to create blockchain-as-a-service.
SAP also announced that it had initiated a global blockchain consortium to create standards for the technology. It already had five founding members and 65 customers on board, including Airbus, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Intel.
Torsten Zube, head of blockchain at SAP, told Business Times that the consortium would serve as a framework that allows individual members to protect their intellectual property.
However, blockchain-as a-service is arguably the bigger news. As Zube put it: “Customers can now implement scenarios in a productive way, at enterprise standards, with service level agreements.”
Zube provided several examples of use cases:
● “Product provenance and traceability, for both food safety and pharmaceutical products, allows for root cause analysis to see what I did to cause a specific problem.”
● Pallets of medicines being shipped to pharmacies are fitted with sensors that track data such as shipping, temperature en route, and delivery. They feed the information into a SAP ERP system, which also carries data on sources of ingredients and information on manufacture and the like. The system, in turn, stores the data in a blockchain, which provides a full audit trail should anything go wrong once medicine is dispensed.
● Insurance can be built into this example, with the blockchain providing smart contracts that automatically record claims and trigger payments when required.
● Storing supplier detail like verified bank accounts in a blockchain, so that a fraudulent photoshopped invoice can’t trigger a payment to the wrong account.
“Blockchain allows all participants to share data, securely and confidentially, in one value chain,” said Zube. He argued, however, that the real foundation of all these solutions lay elsewhere: “Blockchain generates trust, and that’s its value.”
Blockchain allows all participants to share data, securely, in one value chain