Charley Cooper, Managing Director at R3
Complexity is the enemy of adoption in technology. Most of the technologies that have become ubiquitous in our personal and business lives have achieved the feat of making day-to-day tasks more efficient without adding unnecessary barriers to entry.
Enterprise blockchain is no exception to this rule. For blockchain to be practical and scalable across many different organisations with very different goals and pre-existing technologies, the underlying platforms need to strive for simplicity and flexibility.
It all boils down to a simple fact: organisations want to simplify how they launch or join networks. Businesses do not want deployment and operations to delay their time to demonstrable value, and they want their blockchain nodes to ‘live’ where their current infrastructure lives.
This means that deploying a blockchain node needs to be as simple as booting up a laptop for the first time and connecting to peers on a network should be pain-free, regardless if the node is deployed on-premises or across a single- or multi-cloud environment.
For a blockchain platform to achieve mass adoption, it needs to be able to ‘deploy anywhere’ with the fewest clicks, allowing customers to focus on business value, not deployment headaches.
This is part of the reason why purpose-built enterprise blockchains have gained an edge over public blockchains in the business world. Public blockchains have injected ever-increasing complexity into their delivery roadmaps, as they grapple with working backwards to achieve the scalability and flexibility needed for enterprise buyers.
To gain initial adoption by the elusive ‘fast followers’ within the corporate world, customers must be given a simplified and low-friction experience for starting or joining blockchain networks.
Interoperability with existing infrastructure is key, and is driven by blending the worlds of “on-chain” and “off-chain” as platforms and projects drive through integration with established business networks.
For example, R3’s recent partnership with IBM has made the Corda Enterprise platform available on IBM LinuxOne – both on premises and via the IBM Cloud – which is used by thousands of businesses across the globe. Instantly these businesses are able to tap into the value of their existing IBM infrastructure and deploy an innovative new technology platform.
As a result of initiatives such as this, participants in the blockchain ecosystem can start thinking about how their software can drive market-level – in addition to firm-level – connectivity and transformation. This is a cultural, as well as technological, change, but it is already becoming a reality in sectors as diverse as healthcare, insurance, financial services, trade finance and beyond.
The business networks of tomorrow will be those with a pinpoint focus on simplifying the blockchain journey and leveraging existing infrastructures, allowing firms to benefit from controlled information sharing and workflow without introducing unnecessary complexity. And it is at this convergence of new and existing technologies where true digital industry transformation will take place.
