The enterprise managed blockchain, or blockchain as a service (BaaS) space, is one which though nascent has many of technology’s fastest horses running in the race. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, who continue to conduct their battle for cloud infrastructure, have well-known stakes in blockchain, as well as many of the ‘second tier’ cloud provides, from Alibaba Cloud, to IBM, to Oracle.
A new report from Everest Group has assessed the runners andriders in managed blockchain platforms – and has put IBM and Microsoft Azure atthe top of the tree.
In total, 12 vendors were assessed, with fully half – Alibaba,AWS, Azure, IBM, Oracle and SAP – placing in the all-important top right segment,indicating high market adoption and capability maturity.
IBM scored strongly across all areas according to the analysis,which combined what Everest calls its ‘proprietary service providerintelligence database’, alongside conversations with enterprises and vendors. Thecompany scored full marks on platform configuration and ecosystem, ease ofadoption, enterprise adoption and business value. The only other vendor toscore full marks on any topic was Azure, in vision and strategy – the only segmentIBM failed to get a full house – and ease of adoption.
Of the 12 vendors classified, seven use Hyperledger as atleast part of their stack. AWS, for instance, uses a mix of Hyperledger Fabricand Ethereum, while Azure bakes those two in alongside Corda and IBM is onFabric only. Sovrin, a private sector non-profit, is the only one to differfrom Fabric, utilising Hyperledger Indy.
At the other end of the scale, VMware and HPE both scoredpoorly. The report however did note that VMware was ‘poised for enterpriseadoption’ given its promising feature set and ‘long-term ecosystem vision.’ HPEwas praised for its outlook across critical financial infrastructure, for whichthe company has a long heritage.
One company not analysed in this report is Google Cloud; thethird of the ‘big three’ cloud hyperscalers, depending on which analyst one follows.While the company’s efforts in blockchain are not as pronounced, initiativesare taking place, such as the partnershipannounced with Cypherium in August. Here, this can be seen as more of aninfrastructure deal to ‘provide enterprises with a full-stack solution to harnessthe potential’ of distributed LEDGER technologies (DLT), as Cypherium put it atthe time. The company also has deals in place with IBM Cloud and AWS.
Everest outlined the rationale for managed enterpriseblockchains – and how this is set to continue. “Enterprises are betting big onblockchain technology and are actively looking for easy ways to understand,prototype, and deploy blockchain-based solutions,” the report noted. “Althoughopen source blockchain frameworks have exploded in popularity in recent years,many enterprises today are looking for mature and deployment-ready solutions thatare easy to adopt, maintain and manage, presenting an interesting marketopportunity for vendors to build service-focused platforms on top of such frameworks.”
Yet such solutions are not an ideal fit for allorganisations. Writing for sister publication CloudTech in June, Eric Dynowski, CTO atServerCentral Turing Group, noted the four tenets required to consider managedblockchain:
- You have to be a big organisation – or at leasthave a developer team used to building software and systems. “The blockchain byitself is useless,” Dynowski wrote. “To make it work, you’ll have to figure outhow to build it into an application, which means you’ll [need] the internalresources for that project
- You need to be willing to share your data – a no-brainer,and ‘non-negotiable’ as Dynowski puts it
- You need an immutable ledger. “This is probablythe easiest criterion to meet, but needing an immutable ledger alone isn’treason enough to adopt blockchain,” says Dynowski
- You need to ensure that implementing blockchaindoes not add to your complexity. “This is the real kicker,” Dynowski concludes.“If you’re only using blockchain to use blockchain, it’s not a good solution”
The complete list of vendors analysed were Alibaba Cloud,Amazon Web Services, BurstIQ, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Jelurida, MicrosoftAzure, Multichain, Oracle, SAP, Sovrin, and VMware.
You can find out more about the Everest Group report here (pdf download, client access required for full report).
