Oracle Blockchain | An Enterprise Grade Cloud Platform Offering | Part One
Note: The article assumes the audience to have basic knowledge of Blockchain technology. The article is positioned towards technologists, architects,CTO, CIO, CEO, investors, analysts and more who are looking for insights from a company practicing in Blockchain eco-system. All curious minds are welcome.
A Practitioner’s View of the Land
Kiran Murty
CTO | AuraBlocks.com | Enabling Blockchain for Enterprises
Movie lovers flock to theaters to watch their favorite movies and sports fans take to the stands throughout the year to see their favorite team play on clay, turf, and the hard top. Seasons change and so do movies and games. (By the way, did you check out the latest Star Wars trailer that was released recently ?
Awesome teaser. We’ll introduce you to our own teaser at the end of this article. Not the movie kind, the techie kind.)
This fall, AuraBlocks happened to be part of one such yearly ritual in the technology world. The Oracle OpenWorld 2017 convention. Open World is the event that brings all things Oracle to SFO downtown for one week. The talent, the technology, and the talks let us all know about the customer success stories of the past year, and help us understand the technologies that will shape the journeys of the future.
A lot has changed in the world of technology since the first Star War series movie was released back in 1977, and surprisingly many things have changed since the time Episode VII: The Force Awakens was released in 2015.
The last two years has seen many emerging technologies becoming mainstream, and a whole new set of technologies being categorized as emerging tech. The list goes something like this for emerging and mainstream technologies that are in use and being explored in the marketplace today:
AI/ML, ChatBots, IoT, AR/VR, Blockchain/Distributed Ledger Technology(DLT), just-in-time anything, personalize anything (CX, Printing, Medicine etc), BigData, adaptive security meshes, self-tuning/healing/governing systems, open API’s, 5G, persistent memory, public cloud, and so much more.
Blockchain, the backbone technology that powers the vibrant crypto eco-systems of Bitcoin and Ethereum, has come a long way and is positioned to be a transformative platform that can promote real-time business collaboration. Now is the time that Blockchain breaks away from being referred to as an emerging technology and is considered an enabling technology that can be put to use in enterprise architectures. The largest software vendors in the industry are taking notice and making huge investments in order to make Blockchain platforms a first-class tenant of enterprise technology stacks.
Oracle’s enterprise Blockchain technology was officially released at OpenWorld 2017. The timing of the release couldn’t have been better. The core technology has gone through a series of vetting and validation cycles in the open-source community before being officially on-boarded to the Linux Foundation as a key project. Hyperledger Fabric community project under the foundation has grown into a solid v1.0 release.
Oracle’s enterprise Blockchain technology cloud offering is built on the solid core from Hyperledger Fabric. Enterprises, executives, and technology leaders can expect the same level of foundational strength in Oracle’s enterprise Blockchain that they would find in other mainstream technologies that are well-adopted by companies who had their origins in the Linux foundation.
This stability isn’t even the best part of the offering. The best part is Oracle’s ingenuity and capability to build on this strong foundation and come up with an enterprise-class offering that satisfies the needs of the most demanding organizations out there. Today, most of these organizations are Oracle’s customers in other portfolio products and so it is a strategic and a natural evolution that Oracle deliver a platform offering like Blockchain that can transform the established business workflows amongst their existing customer base of today and new customer base of tomorrow.
Enterprise demands that hover around:
- Seamless orchestration
- Rapid software code (i.e. smart contract) deployment
- Choice in infrastructure(i.e. business network) rollout models
- Integrated security
- Ecosystem interoperability (i.e. Oracle’s and other market players apps)
We will discuss more about these topics in our next series of articles that we will publish around product architecture and features. For now, know that these features (and many more) are nicely packaged into the Oracle Blockchain Cloud Services PaaS offering that is scheduled for release at the end of this year. The release itself will be a Beta release. AuraBlocks has thoroughly enjoyed working with the product as part of the early Beta program.
Our feedback comes from our experience working on the platform over the course of this year. We built and showcased two Blockchain solutions at Oracle OpenWorld 2017 for customers who have been operating in the Financial Services and Data Management Software industry for over 10 years. You can download a copy of the presentation that talks about our work for a Financial Services company, here: https://static.rainfocus.com/oracle/oow17/sess/14978553361170016nuS/PF/OOW17_AuraBlocks_Biz2Credit_%20CON7242_v11.0_1507732636973001sBmj.pptx
Let’s understand why Blockchain as an enabling platform is ripe for enterprise adoption and what some contributing factors are within the ecosystem that are facilitating this trend. Before going further, both Bitcoin and Ethereum deserve a mention for nurturing such strong ecosystems built on top of Blockchain technology.
That being said, Oracle’s Blockchain offering is NOT Bitcoin or Ethereum. It’s surprising to see and hear many people that we talked to at OpenWorld join the Blockchain conversation with this preconception. We hope our future articles on Blockchain will decipher some of these established misconceptions and prejudices.
Time for Popcorn & Social Media Check-in | See you in Part Two
In Part Two we will learn more about Oracle’s Blockchain offering and understand the market enablers that are propelling the Blockchain technology forward. Oh ! And our own teaser is at the end of Part Two of this article.
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