Unibright and Zühlke Event showcasing blockchain technology
As announced, on Thursday, 21st of June we did a customer event together with our partner Zühlke at their headquarters near Frankfurt. Invited were hand-picked decision-makers and CTOs of mid-sized and large companies, mainly German ones, acting worldwide.
The introduction was done by Philipp Harrschar, Zühlke, presenting their portfolio and the way they assist companies in making use of new technology in general. The audience got an introduction in blockchain technology in general, cryptocurrencies and smart contracts. Philipp also addressed the importance for the right perspective on blockchain: thinking in eco systems!
Unibright presented during the second half of the event, drawing the big picture at first on what every new technology means: challenges, chances and risks for companies that want to make use of it:
- How to find blockchain experts/developers? — they are rare and expensive!
- Which implementation to take ? — there are so many blockchain protocols, with new ones coming up (Ethereum, Hyperledger, NEM, NEO, RSK)!
- How to integrate into existing system landscape? — There are already so many systems used by a company that have to be connected to the new world (e.g. ERP-System in need of information stored in a smart contract)
- How to monitor the complete process? — With even more systems and new technology, the complete process needs tools that allow monitoring from a unifiying instance.
Focusing on blockchain technology, we then presented two use cases, one with a private ledger for an approval process and one using a public blockchain for presenting production data to customers to enlarge transparency and trust.
We selected those examples as we are working on them with possible pilot customers to give the audience something “real” to identify with and draw parallels with their own needs and business processes. This approach was a great success, and we got a lot of interested questions about those use cases by participants.
We then brought the template idea of Unibright into discussion. We highlighted the idea of having process specific templates, solving one use case related need.
As an example, we demonstrated the Unibright framework, including a small live demo of the workflow designer, based on the “Multi Party Approval” Template and prooved our solution to solve the four pain points described above:
- No programmers needed, due to generated code
- No need to decide for one implementation, due to the possibility to generate smart contract code for different blockchain protocols
- Integration made easy by our existing integration platform connecting the involved systems by generated smart adapters
- One, business process specific monitoring cockpit presenting all related information in one place
The presentation ended with a summary of the token launch, the lessons learned and the outlook from a business perspective.
The informal get together afterwards was filled by chats and plans on how to make use of blockchain. New templates were discussed and ideas passed from table to table. We came up with four potential customers we will do follow-up workshops with to discuss in detail what can be done together in terms of setting up a project and bringing blockchain technology alive.
For us it was a very inspiring event, experiencing a change from the quite theoretical discussions during the last months to a “let’s do it!”- approach.
We got superb feedback from decision makers of the biggest European companies, that our framework is exactly what is needed by enterprise customers to start going and make use of smart contracts in various blockchains.
Thanks to Zühlke for setting up this great event and addressing this fine audience. Looking forward to repeating this kind of event very soon!
