There is a nascent opportunity taking place right now to create a market for blockchain-based business in the Cloud. iEx.ec work at the leading edge of Cloud technology to create a secure but decentralised environment in which businesses can thrive. We discuss the opportunity for enabling a blockchain-based distributed Cloud, and how the iEx.ec market network for Cloud resources could potentially impact the whole IT industry.

Firstly, the greatest commitment of the iEx.ec project is to boost key businesses orbiting Cloud computing by creating a real decentralized Cloud blockchain-based market network.

The blockchain technology is great not only for modern payments. Now, it truly begins to prove its role as a key factor in various industries. iEx.ec uses this potential to redefine the way of doing Cloud computing business by connecting the different kinds of resource providers from this domain into a market network, where healthy business rules can be proved at any time.

An important focus of iEx.ec is to create a market network for various providers of services like DApps, applications, servers and data.

Addressing the emerging market of DApps

From an expected impact perspective, there are several angles to look at the iEx.ec project. Firstly, the decentralized applications, or simply, ‘DApps’. These are innovative and disruptive applications built with blockchain technology. As the name indicates, their main quality is to provide a way of decentralizing a functionality in a system from the human society — theoretically of any kind. That is, executing operations without the presence of an authoring central power.

In fact, this is a very nice idea for any community, of any kind — that might like to commit to a set of key rules that define the community’s values, then act accordingly. More interesting, without the fear of these rules to be corrupted some day by some of the participants. This is what DApps are for.

Decentralization brought by DApps is a very appealing quality. However, due to specific design principles of blockchain implementations such as Ethereum, these applications have limited computing resources at their disposal for their execution. The current transaction performance on Ethereum network is insufficient, putting a barrier up DApps to implement real, complex functionalities.

So the DApps need more power! Computing power!

To enrich the DApps with functionalities and consequently with more computing power, they need to be capable of going outside their underlying blockchain to get those resources. This is what we call “off-chain” computation. From this perspective, iEx.ec provides the DApps with a mandatory (and missing) capability to access off-chain computation resources.

From a market perspective, DApps have an estimated Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 60%, and iEx.ec aims to increase this rate even higher, with its cutting edge innovations. Also, the blockchain applications showed significant increases in volume during the last years, with around 35% CAGR by 2021. These estimated trends give as well iEx.ec the confidence of a promising choice in creating economic utility.

Building a decentralized Cloud at Global scale

The Cloud market today is booming. More and more applications and businesses are moving to the Cloud, to benefit from greater accessibility, cost effectiveness, lower risk and flexibility in resource usage. But existent providers of Cloud services struggle to secure customer data and build trust because they are centralised systems. Also, provable Cloud business models based on multi-providers business approach are actually absent. For these reasons, iEx.ec are building the infrastructure for bridging the two technologies — Cloud and blockchain, to harness their synergy.

The very special Altocumulus Lenticularis cloud, Le Massif de Belledonne, Photo credit to: Gheorghe Popa (www.gphoto.ro)

Building a trusted Cloud

A key differentiator of iEx.ec is enabling network participants to carry out business based on an awareness of one another’s quality. In this sense, the aim is to encourage long-term business partnerships that can be proven to be reliable over time. The blockchain tech is really great for that because, in a provable way, it keeps track of all actions executed by users, according to those key rules.

Businesses in the iEx.ec market network will enjoy a wide range of customers in an innovative, blockchain-based approach, mainly characterized by fully controlled traceability and trust. This is because the underlying iEx.ec sidechain will act like a ledger, where providers can verify their transactions. By harnessing these features, iEx.ec aims to build a trusted Cloud network, highly important to businesses operating in the virtual space.

The Cloud market has an estimated compound annual growth rate of 400% by 2020, totalizing more than USD 1 Trillion in IT spending, directly or indirectly affected by this shift. Quoting gartner.com, this will make Cloud computing one of the most disruptive forces of IT spending since the early days of the digital age.

New deals in Cloud computing business

Small Cloud providers

The iEx.ec market network is open to many types of server providers. For example, small Cloud providers can join in order to better capitalize their servers by either running tasks from application or DApp providers or by compensatory operation with other server providers. Hence, iEx.ec comes with a new fashion of addressing the Cloud market.

Nowadays, small Cloud providers have around 30% market share and tend to be left back by big players (like Amazon, Google, Microsoft). Therefore, small Cloud providers may see in iEx.ec a real opportunity to consolidate their market share by better playing their role within a market network.

GPU servers and applications

The iEx.ec market network is also the home of GPU servers. Important such providers are the mining farms that currently monetize their GPU servers by computing blockchain consensus (Proof-of-Work). In addition to this, iEx.ec will allow them to diversify their business by facilitating access to a new market of High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. To name a few of them, iEx.ec will support Deep Learning, Business Intelligence, Numerical Simulations and others.

Innovation and business processes are getting complex, which is driving the demand of HPC solutions. The HPC market is expected to reach USD 36.62 Billion by 2020, at a CAGR of 5.45%. The iEx.ec’s value proposition for GPU server providers stands in implementing a more secure business approach by adopting new, alternative execution scenarios.

Data providers

Different types of application within the market network consume data in different challenging patterns. Whatever their required data volume — Big Data applications that permanently starve for data, or parameter sweep applications that recompute the same data, they all need permanent input.

So data providers come on the iEx.ec scene to fulfill their demand. This is yet another type of provider that completes the market network with indispensable services.

As overview, all types of provider play key roles in the iEx.ec enabled market network, having the ultimate goal of increasing both volume and quality of the participants’ businesses. A participant to the iEx.ec market network is not limited to a single role from the above. She can play more roles at the same time, based on her own business profile.

Enabling next-gen distributed applications

Nowadays we assist to the development of a new form of distributed applications, for which the centralized Cloud is not an adequate solution anymore. For example, with Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. In IoT, the number of connected devices and produced data volumes explode. It’s really huge already, and still increasing.

The IoT applications have complex architectures, relying, among others, on Cloud, to process data, and with inevitable routes between devices that produce data and Cloud. This model creates delays for its users due to the permanent traversal of data, between the place where it is produced (the IoT devices), the place where it is processed (the Cloud) and further, the place where it is consumed (users).

The fog/edge computing paradigm propose a new approach in doing the data processing within the IoT applications, namely at the edge of the network. The reason is to perform calculations where data is produced, with less data movement within organization.

This approach has direct impact on the operating business, by improving quality parameters like better data anonymity and faster turnaround of applications. More precisely, if data is moved less and processed closer to its source, the chance to keep a good anonymity due to less communication hops and obtaining results faster due to lower latency are higher.

Mysterious fog, Cuejdel Lake, Photo credit to: Gheorghe Popa (www.gphoto.ro)

The essence of these execution scenarios that imply Cloud components is decentralization, making IoT applications ideal user candidates of iEx.ec. Just a quick exemplification would be ambient AI, distributed Deep Learning, parallel stream processing, Smart Cities and others.

These will use iEx.ec to implement confidential, localized computations, at the same time being connected with the organization and the distributed Cloud market network. Also, the decentralized Cloud provided by iEx.ec will allow to perform data processing (for instance analyzing the data) where data is produced, with less data movement between producers, consumers and the Cloud.

Hence we expect that iEx.ec be a cornerstone technology for the fog/edge computing paradigm. This is because it provides them with the solution for processing data closer to its source and also complying the rules of the organization, though decentralized.

The Global IoT market reached USD 598.2 Billion in 2015 and the market is expected to reach USD 724.2 Billion by 2023. Further, the market is projected to register a CAGR of 13.2% during the forecast period 2016–2023 globally. So from this perspective, iEx.ec is motivated to address with big innovations, a large, fast growing market.

Market

From a go-to-market perspective, iEx.ec is proposing a new way of doing Cloud computing business by innovatively addressing key requirements of various Cloud applications and execution models.

Shortly, the strategy of iEx.ec is to create value for emerging and promising Cloud technologies with consolidated growth market rates, by addressing real, mandatory requirements, that are key to their development.

All these business facts show a propitious moment for iEx.ec. So for Cloud computing, iEx.ec is just the beginning of a new era!

Let’s join our efforts to see the fascinating challenge of the blockchain Cloud computing era fulfilled. We will be announcing our ICO crowdsale any day now, pop by our Slack channel to say hello or find out more on Bitcointalk.

The iEx.ec Team

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You’re welcome to discover extra iEx.ec resources:

The iEx.ec white paper, website, crowdsale platform.