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Blockchain Brings Business Boom To IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft (fortune.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the cloud-y-forecast dept.

An anonymous reader quotes Fortune's new report on blockchain: Demand for the technology, best known for supporting bitcoin, is growing so much that it will be one of the largest users of capacity next year at about 60 data centers that IBM rents out to other companies around the globe. IBM was one of the first big companies to see blockchain's promise, contributing code to an open-source effort and encouraging startups to try the technology on its cloud for free. That a 106-year-old company like IBM is going all in on blockchain shows just how far the digital ledger has come since its early days underpinning bitcoin drug deals on the dark web. The market for blockchain-related products and services will reach $7.7 billion in 2022, up from $242 million last year, according to researcher Markets & Markets.

That's creating new opportunities for some of the old warships of the technology world, companies like IBM and Microsoft Corp. that are making the transition to cloud services. And products that had gone out of vogue, such as databases sold by Oracle Corp., are becoming sexy again... In October, Oracle announced the formation of Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service, which helps customers extend existing applications like enterprise-resource management systems. A month earlier, rival SAP SE said clients in industries like manufacturing and supply chain were testing its cloud service. And on Nov. 20, Microsoft expanded its partnership with consortium R3 to make it easier for financial institutions to deploy blockchains in its Azure cloud. Big Blue, meanwhile, has been one of key companies behind the Hyperledger consortium, a nonprofit open-source project that aims to create efficient standards for commercial use of blockchain technology.
A Juniper Research survey found six in 10 larger corporations are considering blockchain, according to the article, which adds that blockchain "is increasingly being tested or used by companies such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Visa Inc. to streamline supply chain, speed up payments and store records."

And because of blockchain's popularity, the CEO of WinterGreen Research predicts that 55% of large companies with over 1,000 employees will use the cloud rather than their own data centers within five years -- up from 17% today.

18 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Seriously?! by Dorianny · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Its the .com craze all over again

    1. Re:Seriously?! by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 4, Interesting

      No kidding. Remember the PHB from Dilbert asking for "a database" because apparently that's what the company needs. I thought it was a great joke, but now I've heard something similar more than once, from managers and from people who really ought to know better: "We need to do something with blockchain". By the way, I found a good answer to that is not "what", but "why".

      --
      If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
    2. Re:Seriously?! by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Funny

      A database? Any particular colour?

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  2. Surest sign it's in bubble/tulip territory by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 3, Insightful

    IBM is going all in

    Really? From the article we read "The market for blockchain-related products and services [were] $242 million last year". IBM's revenues last year were around $80 BILLION. The entire block-chain market for products and services was about 0.3% of all of IBM's revenues. That's a VERY interesting definition of "all in" and clearly just an attempt to justify the unstable blockchain market however it can. In this case, by finding a way to hitch itself to a 100+ year old name...

    --
    Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
    1. Re: Surest sign it's in bubble/tulip territory by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So if TFS gets a basic fact wrong, how can we trust it's conclusion that IBM is going "all in"? Again, this reads more like a cheerleader article rather than anything remotely factual...

      --
      Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
  3. Blockchain! But, blockchained blockchain, too. by ScentCone · · Score: 4, Funny

    For my blockchainfast this morning, I blockchained up some scrambled blockchain with a side of fried blockchaing, and fresh-blockchained some blockchain juice so I would be sure to get my Vitamin B(lockchain). While I was blockchaining my blockchain, I read the Blockchain Post before hailing a blockchain for a ride to my downtown blockchain where we blockchained a meeting about the week's blockchain strategy and blockchained some references to blockchain into our corporate blockchain statement. Then off to blockchain for a three-blockchain lunch and a blockchained blockchain before heading to our blockchained client's blockchain to implement some blockchain in their blockchain.

    Whew! What a blockchain of a day. Happy to be home in my blockchain so I can pop open a blockchain and sit down to blockchain Game Of Blockchains on the blockchain, and maybe play a little first-person blockchain VR, or get online and duke it out in World Of Blockchains before I turn in for a good night's blockchain.

    --
    Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
    1. Re: Blockchain! But, blockchained blockchain, too. by LordKronos · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Funny, but that's literally what's going on...people are trying to find a way to wedge "blockchain" into everything. Things ive heard:

      Medical records. Like, really? You want your medical records shared publicly? Or do just want things like document integrity and version history (ie: the features that aren't unique to blockchain) without the group consensus part (ie: the only feature that blockchain brings to the table over previous ideas).

      Public records (marriage, property, etc). Really, who should be the authority here, if not the state/county/city? Trying to prevent them from altering records without your permission? How do you think they are going to do foreclosures and leins? Want to protect against unfiled documents on a title search? People can just as easily fail to properly record documents with blockchain. It offers much of nothing to the existing process.

      We're really just seeing a buch of blockchain-for-the-sake-of-blockchain ideas. Any insufficiencies in existing processes can be resolved through non-blockchain means. If those processes need to be reengineered for blockchain, they could just solve the issue with a smaller, less invasive update without blockchain.

    2. Re: Blockchain! But, blockchained blockchain, too. by MachineShedFred · · Score: 2

      Sure, but at that point what's the advantage over a traditional database that allows very computationally inexpensive inserts and updates? Buzzword-compliance?

      --
      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
  4. Using the cloud for critical stuff is suicidal by gweihir · · Score: 4, Informative

    You just do not have enough control and you cannot make sure your core business survives an outage. In addition. it does not really save that much money, it often ends up costing significantly more. Sure, if you do your own infrastructure, you need some competent IT people to run it and make it work well, but maybe refrain from paying peanuts and your IT people will not be monkeys. In the end you do not only get a well-working in-house infrastructure, you get people that care about your company maintaining it and you actual get in-house expertise for all purchases. You just need to realize that IT is critical and that IT is much more important than any of your other functions. That is hard for the "business" side of things.

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    1. Re:Using the cloud for critical stuff is suicidal by gweihir · · Score: 2

      You do not need to build your own data-center in order to have your own infrastructure. Co-location of your servers is entirely fine for smaller companies. It wills till be your servers, under your administration. And that is what counts.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    2. Re: Using the cloud for critical stuff is suicidal by LordKronos · · Score: 2

      As much as I hate sympathizing with the Blockchain!!! PR machine, the cloud is an environment where blockchain might actually make sense; you have (at least in theory) a very portable, yet verifiable âoedatabaseâ with distributed validation.

      But blockchain's value isn't just in distributed storage, validation, or anything like that. Its value is how difficult it is to tamper. Why is it difficult? Because to tamper with it, you need to control the majority of it, which requires a massive investment in computational power. This works for bitcoin, because there is a broad community interest (including monetary incentive) to participate, which means to control it you'd have to invest many billions of dollars in hardware and electricity to take control. But for a private company, how much money are they going to invest to maintain this continual busywork network to secure their data? Any hacker with a botnet will easily be able to rewrite the chain however they desire. So unless they can convince the public to invest massive public resources to secure the private corporate data, the only new feature of blockchain vanishes instantly. You are better off just having a very well locked down signing server to serve as a notary for all transactions, or something like that depending on which feature you ACTUALLY want.

  5. Digital Ledger. by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 3, Informative

    "Blockchain" is nothing more than a digital ledger with a checksum.

    Nothing about using blockchain requires you to use the public ledgers (Like Bitcoin). You can control the entire ledger if you want.

    1. Re:Digital Ledger. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "Blockchain" is nothing more than a digital ledger with a checksum.

      No. A blockchain is a DISTRIBUTED digital ledger with a hash (not a checksum).

      The "distributed" part is what is important, since it means that no one party can corrupt it.

      The fact that it is hashed, rather than merely checksumed, also means it is very difficult to corrupt.

    2. Re:Digital Ledger. by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 2

      The "distributed" part is what is important, since it means that no one party can corrupt it.

      That is how the current systems are setup.

      It doesn't mean that Walmart can't setup an internal only "blockchain" that only runs on their intranet to track store balances.

  6. Here we go again by bobm · · Score: 2

    Everyone is seeing how bitcoin has this great big distributed network and (in my experience) the people thinking we will us the same blockchain distribution haven't figured out that it's not going to be free to have multiple hosts for the chain.

    link to another discussion: https://www.quora.com/In-a-pri...

    I for one can't wait for Oracle to enter this market. (disclaimer - I hate Oracle).

  7. Re:I think people just like saying "blockchain" by GameboyRMH · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Not the same thing:

    https://stackoverflow.com/ques...

    However blockchain technology is still overhyped, because private blockchains are just inefficient databases. There's no good reason to use them where there is no trust problem between peers, so there are only a few niche industries where a blockchain would be helpful, such as digital notary services.

    --
    "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
  8. Estonia runs on blockchain by ToughRat · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And the rest of the world is far behind: https://www.newyorker.com/maga...

  9. Old Technology by PPH · · Score: 2

    There have been some lending companies in New Jersey using blockchain for decades. Every once in a while, the chain slips off of a lender in arrears and the body pops up up in the East Channel.

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.