Last week, Andrew Lunde - a solution architect for SAP's Independent Software Vendor partner program - published a preliminary article discussing the case for using the THETA Network in emerging areas of enterprise applications.
Theta themselves later specified this to be in the area of Multiexperience development platforms (MXDP).
Who Are SAP?
SAP are said to be the third largest software company in the world (the largest outside of the U.S.), employing over 100,000 people worldwide and with reported revenue in 2019 of 27.5 billion Euros.
Founded in 1972, SAP was initially known as System Analysis Program Development. They have built their reputation by focusing on providing software for the management of business processes and developing solutions that facilitate effective data processing and information flow across organisations.
According to SAP's website they now have "...more than 230 million cloud users, more than 100 solutions covering all business functions, and the largest cloud portfolio of any provider."
In April this year it was widely reported that Google replaced their Oracle finance software with an alternative from SAP.
Why Use Theta and Not Ethereum?
Andrew Lunde explained that while "...Ethereum is faster [than Bitcoin] and can settle in minutes... Theta stands out for being even faster, cheaper, and has an interesting technical feature called off-chain micropayments that is worth digging into further when we think about applying blockchain technology to enterprise use cases."
Lunde acknowledged that "If you start researching Theta you are likely to be put off by all the video gaming, virtual reality role-playing, poker tournament and wacky video content. Add to that there is a heavy group of traders and speculators making claims about the future value of everything including Theta."
However, he went on to suggest that "...it’s important to look past the surface and into the underlying technology... I think there is opportunity here for the enterprise space and it’s worth digging deeper."
In his regular updates to the SAP community, Lunde documents his use of the SAP Business Application Studio (BAS) for the development environment and the CloudFoundry environment within Business Technology Platform (BTP) to provide a “privatenet” with an built-in supply of THETA and TFUEL tokens for experimentation.
For the non-techies, Theta explained that Lunde is demonstrating the basics of "...how to store and provide the Theta blockchain secret key to the application without revealing to anyone else through the SAP dev environment, and testing to confirm that a Theta transaction fee charged to the sender is equal to about ? of thousandth of a cent. These are the basic building blocks — a highly efficient, secure blockchain."
This is just the start as Theta believe "The interesting part is next: smart contracts, off-chain micropayment implementation and Dapps supporting multiple entities, devices and value chain participants."
Can Theta Deliver?
In the Theta blog, confidence is running high that they can fulfil the roll required and they state "This is an unique opportunity for Theta to become a household name in every global enterprise, to be the fabric underlying these cutting edge multi experience applications."
So although Lunde maybe correct when he implied that Theta has been seen - up to now at least - as a glorified streaming service, Theta confirmed their "...journey in the enterprise space is just beginning, and we expect to see exponential growth opportunities as we move forward..."
