The Open Data Initiative by Microsoft, SAP and Adobe is a great idea, but it lacks neutrality. Here Insolar can offer a solution.

Rise of Data

We live in a data age, we create more of it than ever before: the average person generates almost 1.5 gigabytes per day, to be precise! But the true promise of the data economy isn’t just in clocking up the terabytes and petabytes, nor in its availability or quality. Yes, data is transforming virtually all aspects of our economy and society, but the potential has remained largely unfulfilled since we have so far lacked the technology to allow for standard, secure and efficient data exchange.

Open Data Initiative

Today’s centralized databases are self-imposed silos — centralized repositories serving one master. However, there are those looking to take a different approach. The Open Data Initiative is one such effort to securely combine data from Adobe, Microsoft, SAP, and other third-party systems in a customer’s data lake to effectively create a data ocean. The idea makes great sense in our data-centric world, since collaborative data sharing will enable enterprises to easily and seamlessly harness and combine information to get “a single source of truth” about the customer and use it to create extraordinary experiences in real time.

Central Issue

Although, questions still remain as to the architecture to be employed to facilitate this initiative — Microsoft Azure; but shouldn’t the cloud infrastructure behind this shared data exchange be vendor-neutral?

Need for Neutrality

If Microsoft Azure remains the sole storage option for this initiative, the Open Data Initiative founding members — Adobe, Microsoft, and SAP — shouldn’t expect other large players and Microsoft competitors like Amazon, Google, Salesforce and Oracle to participate. After all, their participation would drive additional usage of Microsoft Azure cloud, while opening them up to disruption by other business app providers that could build on top of the same platform and poach business from existing customers.

DLT as an Enabler

Data-driven innovation is a key enabler of growth in the world, and the new data-inspired innovation on the block are distributed ledger technologies (DLT). Blockchains and other DLT take the opposite approach to current, siloed networks — the architecture is native to a decentralized and democratic environment of trusted data exchange. The ability to decentralize a data set across a network of participants provides a transparent, unified and trusted repository of information. This capability is now the basis for the framework of a next generation of platforms where data is not owned by centralized entities.

Tech Deficiencies

However, the majority of blockchains at present can only store a small amount of data. Moreover, these blockchains have low throughput, meaning that network calculations take time to complete, slowing the speed at which data can be exchanged. This makes them doubly unsuitable for data lakes which involve high transaction frequency and masses of data.

Insolar Offers a Solution

The solution to the above issues is Insolar: a next generation blockchain built for enterprise with business needs as a foundation. Insolar platform’s cloud-based architecture has been devised not only to overcome scalability issues, but also as one of the most secure, with support for various cryptography schemes respective to national and industry standards. On-chain storage of large amounts of data and a high transactional throughput are just two of the features that make Insolar the choice blockchain platform for enterprise data sharing.

Improving on a Great Idea

What SAP, Microsoft and Adobe are proposing in the Open Data Initiative is the kind of idea that enterprise has been looking for. Pairing it with an independent platform will widen the scope by bringing in big fish that also turn out to be major competitors. This is what makes Insolar an all-round solution that caters to the vision set forth in the ODI, yet expands on it to accommodate an even wider market.

If this is something that interests you, get in touch for us to make the global data ocean a vendor-neutral reality.