This is the fifth article of a series attempting to evaluate technologies that lead the next wave of innovation in enterprise software. The list is based on a recent article published an article on ReadWrite about trends that are destined to change the future of enterprise software. The article includes 14 trends that we consider relevant consider its maturity in the industry.

• enterprise hardware
• the industrial Internet of Things
• applications powered by the blockchain
• proactive analytics
• 3D printing
• enterprise marketplaces
• domain-specific data science
• augmented reality in industrial settings
• mainstream machine learning
• drone platforms
• next-generation cybersecurity
• platforms for microservices
• the Docker ecosystem
• new application-development platforms for the enterprise

Today we would like to focus on a new technology that has the potential of completely disrupting traditional enterprise software solutions: the Bitcoin Blockchain.

The blockchain in the Enterprise

Bitcoin has become one of the most intriguing and revolutionary technologies created in the last few years. From a functional standpoint, the crypto-currency has challenged the most fundamental principles of the world’s financial systems by providing a decentralized, secured and trusted model to process financial transactions. To enable its magic, Bitcoin relies on an architecture powered by a groundbreaking technology known as the Blockchain.

The blockchain is Bitcoin’s public ledger. From a functional standpoint, the blockchain provides a decentralized, time stamped, ordered record of all transactions in a Bitcoin network that can be verified at any time. These simple capabilities represent the first practical answer to profound computer science problems based on the trust of nodes in a decentralized network.

Adopting the Blockchain in the Enterprise

Despite its unique value, the process of adopting blockchain solutions in the enterprise is far from easy. Like any other technology trend, the blockchain will have to develop a series of enterprise-ready capabilities to be adopted in business scenarios. The following list includes some of the key capabilities required to adopt the blockchain in mainstream enterprise scenarios.

• Development Platform: The blockchain is a very complex architecture modeled in terms of transactional exchanges. In order mitigate that complexity, we need programming frameworks and languages that allow average developers to build general-purpose applications against the blockchain.
• Monitoring Tools: To be adopted in enterprise settings, the blockchain community should produce solutions that can actively monitor the health of a blockchain network and recover from unexpected failures.
• Private Cloud Deployments: Facilitating the deployment of the blockchain in private cloud topologies using mainstream enterprise infrastructures is a key element to facilitate the wide adoption of blockchain solutions in the enterprise.
• Standards: As organizations start adopting blockchain solutions, the need to standards to guarantee the interoperability between different platforms will become more relevant.
• Interoperability with Well-Established Enterprise Platforms: Like any other enterprise software trend, blockchain solutions will be required to integrate with established enterprise platforms like databases, line of business systems, etc. Enabling that interoperability will be essential to power the adoption of blockchain solutions in the enterprise.

5 Industry Scenarios That Can be Disrupted By The Blockchain

The decentralized, autonomous, trusted and secured capabilities of the blockchain that can redefine of the foundational patterns of enterprise applications. While the principles of the blockchain are well understood patterns in enterprise solutions, until now we have lacked practical implementations that validate its functionality at an enterprise scale. The blockchain opens a new set of opportunities to enterprise scenarios that weren’t possible before. The following list includes some industry scenarios that can drastically improve by the adoption of blockchain technologies.

Decentralized IOT

The internet of things (IOT) is becoming one of the most important trends in modern enterprise software. While many IOT platforms are based on a centralized model in which a broker or hub control the interaction between devices, this model has proven to be impractical for many scenarios in which devices need to exchange data between themselves autonomously.

The blockchain provides foundational capabilities of decentralized IOT platforms such as secured and trusted data exchange as well as record keeping. In this type of IOT architectures, the blockchain will serve as the general ledger keeping a trusted record of all the messages exchanged between smart devices in an IOT topology.

Keyless Signature

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) has been one of the fundamental technologies powering data signatures. PKI models rely on a central authority to stamp and validate signatures on a data payload.

The characteristics of the blockchain can help to overcome some of the limitations of PKI models with a keyless security infrastructure (KSI). A KSI model uses only hash-function cryptography, allowing verification to rely only on the security of hash-functions and the availability of a public ledger commonly referred to as a blockchain.

Legal Proof of Existence or Proof of Possession

Validating the existence or the possession of signed documents is an incredibly relevant element of legal solutions. The challenge of traditional document validation models is that they relied on central authorities for storing and validating the documents which presents some obvious security challenges but also becomes more difficult as the documents become older.

The blockchain provides an alternative model to proof of existence and possession of legal documents. By leveraging the blockchain, a user can simply store the signature and timestamp associated with a document in the blockchain and validate it at any point using the native blockchain mechanisms.

Security Trade Settlement

Central Security Depositaries (CSDs), has been an essential element of modern equity and bond trading. The centralized nature of CSDs is essential to a successful bond and equity trades. However, the settlement process via CSDs is incredibly expensive and slow averaging two or three days per trade settlement.  

The blockchain offers an interesting alternative to traditional CSDs as a decentralized ledger that can keep records of transactions without relying on a central authority. The query capabilities of the blockchain will allow the settlement of trades in minutes or even seconds and at a fraction of the cost of the current CSD solutions.

Anti-Counterfeiting

Counterfeiting remains as one of the biggest challenges in modern commerce. Segments like luxury goods, pharmaceutical or electronics are constantly affected by counterfeiting. Unfortunately, most solutions in the market require a trust in the third party authority which introduces a logical friction between merchants and consumers.

The decentralized and security capabilities of the blockchain can enable an interesting alternative to traditional anti-counterfeiting platforms. In that sense, we can envision a model in which brands, merchants and marketplaces are part of a blockchain network with nodes storing information to validate the authenticity of specific products. In this model, brands don’t have to trust on a central authority with their product authenticity information and can rely on the security and decentralized trust models of the blockchain.