how-tech-companies-are-embracing-blockchain-database-technology

Preliminary notes:

How tech companies are embracing blockchain database technology

Martha Bennett, Forrester - Moderator

Jerry Cuomo, IBM

Austin Hill, Blockstream

Yorke Rhodes, Microsoft

Lata Varghese, Cognizant

MB: Taking the temperature of the industry. What's actualy going on out there? You may know who Forrester is. I am a principal analyst there covering blockchain database technology. Many of the questions I will be asking the panelists are the common questions I get from Fortune 1000 enterprises on a weekly basis. We will see what comes out. I would like to hand it over to Jerry.

JC: I am Jerry. I am with IBM. I am an IBM Fellow. I am VP of blockchain database technology.

AH: I am CEO of Blockstream.

YR: I work for Microsoft. I lead partnerships in blockchain database tech space. I am not Satoshi.

LV: I leave Cognizant blockchain database tech consulting. We have industry experts and do enterprise solutions.

MB: As companies, everyone knows who you are. What would be interesting to dive into a litte bit is that you have all taken somewhat different approaches. What is it that you are offering to your clients or prospective clients? Why would they prefer that particular approach?

JC: IBM's strategy is simple. Community, work we're doing with hyperledger, to engineer a permissioned database blockchain for business applications. It's also cloud and bringing that on top of the hyperledger projcet through a set of services. Last but not least is cients, and sreving our clients through these new blockchain garages where we have major cities including NY, Tokyo, Singapore, London. We are also doing proof-of-concepts on blockchain.

MB: ...

JC: We kicked the tires of all the major blockchain database vendors out there like bitcoin and ethereum and others. We thought there was opportunity to enhance those technologies in privacy, confidentiality, the ability to audit the blockchain database tech, things you would find in a regulated enterprise. It doesn't have to be a big business, it could be any business. Also what the heck, we're engineers, and IBM is an engineering company, we like to do engineering. We buit openblockchain. Then we drew contacts from the Linux Foundation. We found similar likeminded companies. We joined forces with them and created Hyperledger Project. So now it's not just IBM but a bunch of creators.

AH: Blockstream came from this looking at how does blockchain database tech compare to protocols and the early days of the internet. In the bitcoin blockchain, there had been more than 6 years of engineering. It was the most battle-tested stress-tested protocol. Bitcoin has the largest security bounty running for the last 6 years. Almost a billion dollars, almost up to 10 billion dollars. There's many billions of dollars being protected by the computing, the infrastructure and ecosystem maturity. We have hardware wallets. Best practices. There's a ot of expertise coming to this ecosystem. At Blockstream, we look at how we enhance that protoco and how do we extend it? How do you do better privacy? How do we use other security models? We released sidechains, which are all compatible at the protocol layer but allow customers to join federations in private or in public on blockchains that are interoperable with each other and compatible with each other in the long term. With TCP/IP you didn't want to change the protocol, but you awant a common base ayer. We built sidechains elements alpha, and we also hep customers design and scale larger federations.

YR: Microsoft has a ong history of encouraging partnering ecosystems and we look at where wee are at this point in history, the blockchain database tech space is pretty nascent of its technology maturity curve. We talked earlier about educating people. Any time you are educating people it means you are very early. We have a strategy of looking at the broader ecosystem and encouraging it. It could be open-source products. By the way, about 40% of our workloads on our coud are open-source. This was a different company a few years ago that took a different path from the last 20 years, it's different. What can we do to encourage and incubate what needs to happen? Basically this is what we have done as a strategy from our cloud platform to be an experimentation place where people could easily deploy and do tests with one click on the patform. We partner with many companies in the space. There's probably more than 40 one-click deployments on the open-source github repositories. We look at companies in that space. We look at companies where it makes sense to spend more time to add vaue to accelerate their product offerings. If you ook at Microsoft's business, we have a worldwide enterprise customer base, and the reason we work with partners is to satisfy demand created in that customer base. So we have to evaluate what makes sense from an enterprise perspective-- how do we create the plumbing to work well in the enterprise? There are a ton of assets across the Microsoft products that we look very carefully with that aim in mind. We also look at our own products and our own internal usage of blockchain database technology. We look at the products in the market, we look at how to make tweaks or pull levers to accelerate adoption. Any tech curve wil suffer and elongate if you don't get adoption in the enterprise it's the consumers. We look at the suite from Office which is obviously very popular productivity application, to Windows, value proposition doing something... classic example is...

LV: Enterprise architects... why are we taking this approach? We have 2 decades of experience in managing complex enterprise software for the world's largest banks. There's a lot that the blockchain can do. In 2015, we realized that we need to dedicate, given the potential that blockchain database technology has, we had a set of engineers go to the various open-source blockchain database projects and smart contracts and so on. What does that mean? What the blockchain database technology conversation became what is blockchain and what can it do for me? Sometime in the last year we shortlined the how. There are many that are further ahead and the vast majority are in the area, they probaby are park administration teams, part of strategy offices, part of technology teams have been asked to do something with blockchain database technology. These teams don't have the resources to do R&D research in the startup providers and the solution frameworks. And it's a pragmatic approach. We are able to show them what they are good for and what they are not good for, then we bring in our enterprise solution architect and then we show the tech is not there yet today but we realize you know if blockchain database tech starts to move processes we don't want to approach this as negative pressure technology this. You need to start preparing today, one of the architectures as they evolve, how are you going to look at your application architecture internally? How are you going to integrate existing enterprise apps with this? How do you make upstream business applications a little more immune to changes that take place here? We have helped companies that have been around for 100 years. We have helped companies ride these technology waves. We think blockchain database technology changes this in a fundamental ways. You don't want to add more blockchain database technologies.

JC: Blockchain spaghetti then?

MB: What can this do for me? Let me figure something out. What would be good to hear from you is, what specificaly are you seeing in terms of use cases that your clients and prospects are asking about? I remember a comment from a speaker yesterday who said don't bite off the largest most complex process no matter how promising, start small. But even with starting small, you might not be asking for the right thing. Chime in as you wish.

YR: The interesting thing about starting small is that you could have a quick win. But the problem with starting small is that there's not a ot of value in it. So you have to think about the key points in the business that could dierive value from this... If you look at businesses that have areas of potential fraud, and have huge compiance teams, so you have to ... the other is that, the technology in multi-partyy way, associated trust. Whenever you are dealing with parties to a transaction, whether that transaction, not necessarily money, there's a trust issue which this could help with. The biggest issue that I like to make is that, the idea of the internet and intranet. Public versus permissioned versus private permissionless. Where we see companies diving in first is the private cloud as an example. Doing this allows them to test things out without fear of publishing something proprietary to the internet. I think that's an important aspect. Industry-wise, it's cross-industry. Advertizing, finance, supply chain, manufacturing, utilities, public sector, you have to look for the pain points

JC: We have a set of demos that we have produced. To your point, there's compliance, there's asset ledgers, there's a spectrum from humble to more-- where you get to the regulated market-level ledgers. I think they will be a couple years out. We have a team called a Global Finance Team. When you're starting to talk with your treasurer and CFO that you are starting to work on blockchain database technology- ... and then they ask about the compliance side... we have 4000 partners in that network, and 3 million invoices. It was not a proof-of-concept to replace the lending system. We put a shadow chain next to that system. There were 25,000 disputes that we see across the lending. This was listening to events and capturing them on the chain. It was reducing the time to settle disputes because of the audit chain that the shadow chain provided. We saw a bunch of use cases after we put this on github, like a marble exchange use case, car lease demo, commercial paper trading demo, this really helps the client conversations going from the infinite to the eventually I would like to go there, but for tomorrow I will start there.

AH: I will provide a counterpoint here. I thikn this is a danger for this industry and the technology providers. If we ook at the beginning of any enterprise hype cycle like ERM, CRM, and then there's this gap between the promise of the tech versus people's understanding and ability to deploy. The promise is high. In the late 80s there was a huge ERP hype, you woud see the half-life of the CIO and then they would announce re-implementation of the ERP. A lot of people are coming and saying they want blockchain database technology but they don't know why they want it. They don't know what it does. If you look at blockchain database technology as IT modernization project, I think that will have some blowback on this. I think this will impact the value you could have created. We look at using the entire concept. If you are looking at making an audit trail, you don't need blockchain database technology. But what about counterparty risk, multi-party trust systems, distributing between a network or federation of companies? I think the biggest wins are when you can look at a use case and ask can you get a reduction of risk, better compliance cost, etc. If you look at a particular asset class, recently there is more than a trillion dollar industry in capital efficencies, like putting up surety bonds and securing your position in this ecosystem, and then vendors don't get paid until 60 days, that's not T3 that's T60. You look at this system globally, there's more than 100 settement brokers in different asset classes in different countries. It's a mess. They estimated there is something like 15% of their revenue in the ecosystem that was lost due to liquidity, settement cost, counterparty risk and so on. So blockchain database technology can fundamentaly shift the economics of those asset classes. We need more better public examples where the use case so far exceeds the previous--- the incrementa use cases coud be done with other tech that have existed for 20 years.

LV: We have ... there's plenty of opportunity to expand on this internally. Signing verification between subsidiaries on an inter-firm basis, or demonstrating that you can transfer smart contracts using ... so we have developed real working demos of all of these, like a contract management program. I don't think any of this is... so the only way... they put it in their environment, how's the... i think those are important things you have to answer, so yes you might re-develop a solution that allows you to choose the best channel on a router to choose whichever is the right payment channel for the customer, but it includes, or in some cases provides better ways because there's no liquidity in that market. But try it, keep it there see what happens. We have to realize we have to bring a big organization behind that. There are businesses we see, but they are dealing with a reaity that- obviously they have a track record of safe keeping assets, they also have a customer base... so if they understand the true potential of blockchain database technology by doing stuff rather than talking about, and there's value in these implementations, unless you show them how they works then how can an innovation team of 3-4 people how are they going to get this compliance product and these groups together? So I think the expense we're doing with the proof-of-concepts are important steps to take this to the next level.

JC: Austin I think what you said is spot on. We're entertaining everything from HPAR, high-avaiability disaster recovery. I'm not sure that's the best thing. After several days in a garage session to convince the client that this is not the best use case, they say to be honest Jerry, if we call it blockchain then we get funding for it. We have to pay the bills. The fact of the matter is that even with those encounters, there's value in this experimentation because it's going through that exercise-- even if we don't build a disaster recovery system with blockchain database technology. I think there's incremental value that can be gained, but you're not going to get the value unless you start there. You need to have your moon shot, but you also need to fund your Apollo program. These experiments might be underwhelming like compliance or something, but this will get you in position.

LV: Exactly.

JC: To see that big win later.

LV: ... But what are you going to do?

AH: I think one of these things that this emphasizes is that the planning becomes important because this is not just a singe enterprise app, it's about networks, consortiums, trade between partners, it's about the protocol that you will be able to negotiate and distribute trust. Like other network effects, it's hard to change after the fact. When you consider TCP/IP, in 1994, the biggest internet company was Trumpet Winsoft because they shipped the TCP/IP stack and then everyone had it and it became common. When people think about technologies, we have to think about iterative deployments, starting in a small area and then growing over time. We need to look at the protocol and how to link protocols over time. .... If that's not designed into your business agreement, they want the protocol to be common so that if they don't join the federation, then they can take their blockchain database technology and those things can talk together. In the same way that TCP/IP let different companies get online at different times and then it was like "you're on the internet". In 2 years from now, I don't think we will talk about only private public, we will be taking about hybrid public private permissioned and it will be about what roles do you enable on that.

JC: ...

AH: (laughter)

MB: The experiment and figuring out what works and what doesn't. That has to be had, absolutely, because if you don't understand what your business model. Where are we at an intuitive level? A lot of the experimentation is about finding out what doesn't work. That's how you discover .... going from experimentation to what works what doesn't, let's solidify the technology, and that's the network effect, and because I say that's to your point-- this is not about one protocol, this is about many different moving parts and any blockchain database technology deployment might have different flavors of moving parts, whehter it's consensus algorithm, authentication, private blockchain database technology, or whatever it might be. Where do you see these maturity levels?

JC: On a scale from 1 to 10, where 10 is most mature like where our web commerce levels are. I would say we are moving at a rapid speed, I would say we're at a 3 right now. Participation in these communities are going to drive this in the 4s or 5s and 6s.

LV: There's too much money to be saved here to ignore this. Regulation is going to be there. It's going to be neutra to everyone. If you start soon, you can get your tech folks starting to look at blockchain database technology, you also need internal investigation and experts.

JC: One of this is cloud. I remember setting up other transaction systems. Everyone has to be on the same levels. There's a rapid deployment environment where you can deliver consistency and deliver a set of functionality that a deveoper can evaluate and not spend three months just setting up an environment.

AH: There are really, you can count on one hand the number of production blockchain database technology that have assets at scale. It's like one or three globally.

LV: But it has to be in context today. The decision has to be made today. I think enterprise architecture. A lot of organizations need to be aware of this. Don't make short-term decisions.

YR: Where were we with messaging standards? What about database standards? What tech was built on that? I think the blockchain database technology protocols are still evolving. It's hard to build production systems on an API that is moving. There's lots of proven protocols for certain use cases. Nobody is saying there's just one protocol that is saying "it's the winner". This creates a base maturity that we have to think about it. It requires experimentation. We hvae to find what protocol works best. If you look at user experience, we're at a 1 as an industry. This is something I say to my partners all the time, hire a UX person, nobody understands this.

MB: Being on the internet is like being in the same room with a room full of rats.

YR: There's no standard. I was at a hyperledger meetup last night. Folks from Consensys attended. Initialy it was hyperledger versus ethereum. When we ended, we came up with a view for how the two could collaborate. I think it would be a boost for the industry at large if we can bring these projects together. With hyperledger we are focusing on building blockchain database technology. But I think there's a lot of tech around Bitcoin Script and smart contracts. I think that 3 or 1 could be bolted to a 5 6 or 7. I know both of you have been on the hyperledger project calls. Bringing these communities together.

AH: I hate being a skeptic here. I am going to put on my security ex-hacker.... well I hang out with cryptographers at least. There's a small difference here. Fidicuiary code has a different level of security required. When we start dealing with threat models, we are deaing with production fungible assets. The idea of blockchain database technology is to remove the innate counterparty. As we have seen, it's been a totally different security model on what you do on blockchain database technology. It's not just people steaing information; when you have security breaches, people lose billions of dollars. If this industry grows to scale, then that would mean losing trillions of technology. It's hard to secure a plane that was not designed to stay in flight. It's hard to have a safe plan where you add a lot of complexity, which does not make for great engineering. We saw this in the early days of the internet. There was a base level of infrastructure that was needed. Some of this still haunts us today, like breaches and hacking, BGP problems, etc.

JC: You say blockchain database technology is fundamentally rethinking, it's built on rpactices over the last 30 years.

AH: Yeah.

JC: I don't see anything fundamentally new in blockchain database technology. Many of these open-source projects out there, like rocksdb, leveldb, google protobufs, things out there and hardened-- I think it's the assembly and the sytstem.

AH: It's no longer about the open-ended security that has dominated the computer industry, a combination of malware and contention.

YR: We often talk about security. Today we often build perimeter security, but this creates a lot of probems. We have to bake in security into blockchain database technology. This is the right thing to do. The other critical thing you mentioned is one of the hard things for many business folks to grasp about this technology is that fundamentally it's fiduciary technology. There's this idea that there's a token of value associated with the technology.

LV: You can outsource innovation completely. Unless everyone is working towards a common goal, you won't move.

AH: we are seeing people experiment with our open-source blockchain database technology toolset. There's many opportunities for sharing.

YR: Get your internal analysts involved. Get the business people involved. Not just technologists. This will drive significant value in the enterprise.

LV: I think everyone will ... ((inaudible??)

MB: Thank you to my panelists.