John Calian, SVP, Deutsche Telekom: How blockchain brings trust to the emerging M2M economy

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“Think about all of your interactions, whether it’s humansdealing with humans or humans dealing with machines,” John Calian, senior vicepresident and head of T-Labs at Deutsche Telekom, explains. “How do you trustthings?”

The concept of trust, so central to the rise in blockchaintechnologies, is one where consumers are increasingly gaining power. But thereis a long way to go. A report from the NYU Stern Center for Business and HumanRights inSeptember predicted several forms of disinformation which will muddy the watersof the 2020 US presidential elections.

While many of the biggest tech players are making agreeable noises – Instagram trialling hiding likes, Twitter banning political advertising, Facebook combating fake news – consumers are understanding how much they, and their data, are worth. So is the time right for disruption?

“It’s a massive topic,” Calian (left) tells The Block. “I think most people now are well aware that although they love Facebook, Google and Instagram, they also should be very careful not to trust it completely.”

Calian quickly notes that he may be ‘a little ahead’ ofhimself – but the trend is there. His job role at Deutsche Telekom suggestssomething of a disparity; experimentation with emerging technologies, but themanagement and shareholder responsibility with SVP status. The latter naturallytends to dominate; his role is to manage the lab and ensure that all his teamare pulling in the right direction with whatever they need.

With blockchain one of the three main technologies under thelab’s remit – artificial intelligence and machine learning, and augmented andvirtual reality are the other two – it is useful to have a more general goal.Trust is the form which that takes. “What we’re doing is preparing for thatfuture, and we want to offer the infrastructure to anybody who wants to takeadvantage of it,” says Calian.

The lab undertakes an impressive amount of work, mixedevenly between academic and commercial. Over the past year, around 80 papershave been published and 15 patents filed for on the former, and 13 minimumviable products (MVPs) created on the latter.

Some of these MVPs are going into a new startup, trust2core,to which Calian has previously advised and will manage going forward. As thename suggests, the focus is on building trust, and ensuring identity innetworks. Identity has long since been cited as a key use case for telcos tothrive in the blockchain system – but Calian argues it goes further.

“I think for the technology world in general, identifyingthings, identifying services, identifying people, computers – it’s never beenmore important that we trust both the origination and termination ofconnection,” says Calian. “Blockchain is a beautiful technology to help solvethe problem of disrupting the identity of things.

“For the systems we create in the future, I believe stronglythat identity is going to be at the core offering, and there’s opportunity forcompanies to create new things where identity, and the security of data andprivacy, are paramount to the success of the new companies that are going toemerge,” Calian adds.

Noting that ‘people clearly aren’t running away’ from BigTech and the social networks, does an element of trust nevertheless have to beregained by the industry? Yes, Calian argues. “We are now able to architect anddeploy systems where everything starts with trust, based on self-sovereignidentities, whether it’s human or machine,” he adds. “This is a paradigm shift.”

At the heart of Calian’s theory on blockchain technology,alongside artificial intelligence, is that at the highest level these will formthe backbone of this new machine-to-machine (M2M) economy. The machines willmake decisions for us, which explains the AI aspect, but first we need to trustthe machines – which is where blockchain comes in.

This is ultimately the message which Calian will beportraying at the Blockchain ExpoGlobal event in London on March 17-18. Delivering a session around how the‘molecular economy’ will power the future M2M economies, Calian will aim toexplain how the wheels are inexorably turning toward this future.

“I want the audience to understand that we are far beyondtalking about cryptocurrencies,” says Calian. “We are deep into taking aboutsystem design, system architecture, new systems that utilise blockchain to bemore efficient, to drive profitable margins higher, to reduce costs, to bringcompanies together in ways of working that they haven’t been able to do before.

“If the world goes the way we think it will, companies can start connecting and doing business without having to go through a lot of due diligence, or go through a lot of integrations.”

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