The blockchain seems to be unstoppable with its profound application in almost every field of technology, finance, governance, entertainment etc. Blockchain has literally revolutionized every single domain that its applied on and still has a long way to go. Currently, the distributed ledger technology has become the talk of the town due to the large-sized enterprises are also taking keen interest to use the blockchain technology to drive the excellence and efficiency in the particular domain by providing the blockchain-as-a-service or simply Baas. Tech giants like Google, IBM, Microsoft and e-commerce behemoth Amazon have already started working on their blockchain versions which later will be integrated with their own platforms like Microsoft’s Azure, IBM’s Bluemix and intelligent computer Watson while new projects like Linux foundation’s Hyperledger, IBM’s fabric, Sawtooth by Intel and Microsoft’s coco network has also been introduced in past year. The aim of these tech giants is to make the blockchain a suitable platform for large organization and revolutionize the way they operate.

This isn’t all. Organizations like Microsoft and IBM have already started the blockchain-as-a-service offering for the domain logistic and supply chain. There is the number of projects is currently in operation aiming to use blockchain platform as Baas for large enterprises like Merks which may eliminate or replace the ERP (enterprise resolution planning software) and IBM & Microsoft are leading the race of development of these types of project. Let’s have look at the different projects and impressive feats accomplished by these tech giants.

Hyperledger

At the end of 2015, the Linux Foundation formed the Hyperledger project to develop an enterprise-grade and open-source distributed ledger framework. They hoped to focus the blockchain community on building robust, industry-specific applications, platforms, and hardware systems to support businesses.

The Linux Foundation saw that there were many different groups building blockchain technology without a cohesive direction. The industry was duplicating effort and the tribalism was leading teams to solve the same problem twice. The foundation knew from its experiences that if this technology was to realize its full potential, an open-source and collaborative development strategy was desperately needed. The Hyperledger project is led by Executive Director Brian Behlendorf, who has decades of experience dating back to the original Linux Foundation and Apache Foundation, as well as being a CTO of the World Economic Forum. So, it’s not surprising that Hyperledger has been well received. Many of the top business and industry leaders have joined the project, including Accenture, Cisco, Fujitsu Limited, IBM, Intel, J.P. Morgan, and Wells Fargo. It has also attracted many of the top blockchain organizations.

Hyperledger is identifying and addressing the important features and requirements missing from the blockchain technology ecosystem. It’s also fostering a cross-industry open standard for distributed ledgers and holding open space for developers to contribute to building better blockchain systems.

IBM’ Watson integration with IoT devices and blockchain

Currently, IBM has come to limelight with their innovative program of bringing IoT and IBM’s blockchain technology together. IBM’s blockchain technology and IoT Platform offer new promising tools and can be leveraged to address many problems facing companies. The IBM Watson IoT Platform can be combined with blockchain services to provide a ready-to-deploy platform for blockchain-based and open-standards-based, IoT applications. IBM’s blockchain technology and IoT Platform combines its supercomputer (Watson) with its IoT Platform to collect data from IoT devices and then analyze the data and take subsequent actions to solve problems.

IBM’s open-standards-based distributed IoT networks can solve many of the problems associated with today’s centralized, cloud-based IoT solutions. Connected devices communicate directly with distributed ledgers. Data from those devices is then be used by third parties to execute smart contracts, reducing the need for human monitoring. The IBM Watson IoT Platform with a Fabric integration replicates data across a private blockchain network and eliminates the need to have all IoT data collected and stored centrally. Decentralized blockchain networks also improve the security of IoT devices. Unique digital identities are built for each device over time. This new way of creating and securing identity is exceptionally hard to spoof.

Microsoft’s Azure blockchain and Coco network

Azure Blockchain as a Service promises public, consortium or private blockchains, with any consensus algorithm you like, definitely reaching public release status with at least some of the promised features sometime soon maybe. You will be able to write smart contracts in Solidity, offering all the advantages of that language that we’ve already seen with the DAO.

Microsoft has recently unveiled a new open-source, high-scaled, confidential blockchain framework called Confidential Consortium, ‘Coco’ in short for blockchain enterprise networks to accelerate the blockchain adoption for enterprise purposes. Coco is based on Ethereum blockchain designed to reduce complexity and increase productivity in commercial companies and large size enterprises by simplifying the consensus. Coco can reduce the duplicate transaction validation by creating a trusted network on nodes or simply Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). Coco network also gives its users the flexibility to integrate with open source blockchains like Intel’s Sawtooth, R3 corda, Ethereum and JPMorgan's Quorum. One of the remarkable achievements of the coco framework is its ability to conduct the transactions per second. According to Microsoft, when the coco framework can handle as many as 1700transactions per second when applied on the private version of the Ethereum blockchain. While the maximum transaction per second (TPS) speed of Ethereum network is merely 13 TPS.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

After Microsoft and IBM, an e-commerce giant, Amazon, has also joined the list of organizations providing top-tier enterprise scale blockchain services. Amazon web services or simply AWS is already popular for the variety of web services and Saas (software as a service) it offers and utilizing the blockchain technology to enhance those services will be the great feat. AWS most probably thinking about utilizing the blockchain technology for advancing their cloud services. AWS’s recent partnership with Kaleido (blockchain based cloud service provider for enterprises) shows the keen interest Amazon is taking to provide Baas for a large sized organization. AWS is planning to deploy the Ethereum based open source blockchain platform to host the various services they offer.

These are the few popular tech companies to name which are working on their own version of blockchain and trying to revolutionize the way the large organization operates. HP, Google, Intel, Oracle, and SAP are few more to name that will come into limelight later in this year with their own out of the box blockchain concepts and products/services.

Disclaimer - The opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect the view of his employer.