Enterprise Blockchain Is Ready to Go Live in 2018 Posted on : Jan 18 - 2018

Talk to enterprise blockchain enthusiasts and they will tell you about the potential use cases in their industries and the proofs-of-concept they have run to prove blockchain value in the enterprise.

Ask them about production deployments… and they demur, pointing out implementation challenges and production-readiness gaps. 

Will this change in 2018 and will we see a significant shift from experimentation to production deployments of enterprise blockchains?

In numerous customer conversations during 2017, the challenges to moving even successful use cases from successful PoCs to pilots and production boil down to five areas of enterprise-grade requirements: performance at scale, operational resilience, security and confidentiality, supportability and management, and enterprise integration.

Enterprises experimenting with blockchain use cases are recognizing the need to address these challenges, and in 2017, some vendors, (including my company, Oracle), announced blockchain platforms focused on these requirements.

With all of the enhancements coming in enterprise blockchain platforms, 2018 will be the year enterprise blockchain goes live and businesses can move from experimenting to production.

Performance at scale

Many enterprise systems handle business transactions at a rate of hundreds or thousands per second. For example, a large Asian telecom handles more than 100,000 billing and mobile payments transactions per second (tps), and a major credit card processor was running over 13,000 tps at peak a number of years ago. Naturally enterprises are concerned about creating large blockchain networks with hundreds or thousands of members, handling growing transaction volumes, and providing sub-second transaction latency.

While today’s blockchain applications may not require these throughput levels, most real-world blockchains do not even approach 100 tps – bitcoin averages 7 tps and ethereum is about twice that, while the transaction wait times (latency) can run into minutes or hours. Enterprise blockchains not only need much higher throughput, but also transaction latency of less than a second for many businesses use cases.  View More